Skip to main content

Looking at raw Mailbox analytics data using EWS and a ChangeDiscovery script

Mailbox analytics is something Microsoft have been working on for a number of years and its seems to be something that has received a little more effort in these pandemic times. If you have ever looked at the Non_IPM_Subtree of your mailbox you will see a lot of data being stored in their from various apps and substrate processes. A while back i wrote a ChangeDiscovery script to allow me to dump out quick what changes where happening in a Mailbox in a short time frame (eg i wanted to see what happened to all the items in a Mailbox when i performed a specific task). If you run this script with a slightly longer time-frame (eg looking over a day) it picks up all the Items that are being written and created for the Mailbox insights processes and other substrate processes.

Most of these emails get written under the 


Usually if I then wanted to look at these type of items I would use OutlookSpy or MFCMapi to browse the raw MAPI properties on items to see if they where of interest. Given the number of these items now and the performance on MAPI in Online mode doing this is extremely tedious so I modified my change discovery script further to dump the RawJson and Data properties that most of the insight items use so you can then look at the whole bunch in Excel. eg the following two properties


 So now i can dump basically everything that is happening in a Mailbox to a CSV in the last day and you can see some of this analytics data is pretty interesting  

eg


and if you looked at the data from the ActivitiesDaily


This is just a quick snippet of data on one item but things like the hourly breakdown of the number of the Messages being read per hour by a user is something that is really interesting and not something you can determine just using the raw data in a Mailbox.

While this raw data may surface elsewhere in a number of different guises and formats that are a lot of specific things you could use it for (outside of the narrative Microsoft are using for this).

The Modified change discovery script is available on Github https://github.com/gscales/Powershell-Scripts/blob/master/ChangeDiscovery.ps1

To run the script and look back 12 hours and dump the RawJson properties use something like

Invoke-MailboxChangeDiscovery -MailboxName gscales@mailbox.com -disableImpersonation -getJsonMetaData -secondstolookback 43200

for 24 hours use

Invoke-MailboxChangeDiscovery -MailboxName gscales@mailbox.com -disableImpersonation -getJsonMetaData -secondstolookback 86400




Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

The MailboxConcurrency limit and using Batching in the Microsoft Graph API

If your getting an error such as Application is over its MailboxConcurrency limit while using the Microsoft Graph API this post may help you understand why. Background   The Mailbox  concurrency limit when your using the Graph API is 4 as per https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/throttling#outlook-service-limits . This is evaluated for each app ID and mailbox combination so this means you can have different apps running under the same credentials and the poor behavior of one won't cause the other to be throttled. If you compared that to EWS you could have up to 27 concurrent connections but they are shared across all apps on a first come first served basis. Batching Batching in the Graph API is a way of combining multiple requests into a single HTTP request. Batching in the Exchange Mail API's EWS and MAPI has been around for a long time and its common, for email Apps to process large numbers of smaller items for a variety of reasons.  Batching in the Gr...
Read more

Sending a MimeMessage via the Microsoft Graph using the Graph SDK, MimeKit and MSAL

One of the new features added to the Microsoft Graph recently was the ability to create and send Mime Messages (you have been able to get Message as Mime for a while). This is useful in a number of different scenarios especially when trying to create a Message with inline Images which has historically been hard to do with both the Graph and EWS (if you don't use MIME). It also opens up using SMIME for encryption and a more easy migration path for sending using SMTP in some apps. MimeKit is a great open source library for parsing and creating MIME messages so it offers a really easy solution for tackling this issue. The current documentation on Send message via MIME lacks any real sample so I've put together a quick console app that use MSAL, MIME kit and the Graph SDK to send a Message via MIME. As the current Graph SDK also doesn't support sending via MIME either there is a workaround for this in the future my guess is this will be supported.
Read more

Export calendar Items to a CSV file using Microsoft Graph and Powershell

For the last couple of years the most constantly popular post by number of views on this blog has been  Export calendar Items to a CSV file using EWS and Powershell closely followed by the contact exports scripts. It goes to show this is just a perennial issue that exists around Mail servers, I think the first VBS script I wrote to do this type of thing was late 90's against Exchange 5.5 using cdo 1.2. Now it's 2020 and if your running Office365 you should really be using the Microsoft Graph API to do this. So what I've done is create a PowerShell Module (and I made it a one file script for those that are more comfortable with that format) that's a port of the EWS script above that is so popular. This script uses the ADAL library for Modern Authentication (which if you grab the library from the PowerShell gallery will come down with the module). Most EWS properties map one to one with the Graph and the Graph actually provides better information on recurrences then...
Read more
All sample scripts and source code is provided by for illustrative purposes only. All examples are untested in different environments and therefore, I cannot guarantee or imply reliability, serviceability, or function of these programs.

All code contained herein is provided to you "AS IS" without any warranties of any kind. The implied warranties of non-infringement, merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are expressly disclaimed.