Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

As Public Folders are now new again in Exchange 2013, I thought I'd put together a post that covered how you can go about accessing and doing certain things with Public folders via EWS and Powershell. Although the underlying way in which Public Folders are now delivered in Exchange 2013 is vastly different from previous version of Exchange the way in which you access them Programmatically in EWS hasn't changed since Exchange 2007. So if your worried about your 2007 EWS code not working against 2013 don't only some minor changes maybe needed. (although if you have WebDAV code your going to need to rewrite this). Choosing the Right API Method for what you want to do The big thing when your considering creating a Public Folder application is to understand and choose the correct API for what you want to do. Eg if you want to write an application that is going to manage Public Folders eg Size/creation/deletion/Mail-Enable and folders permissions then EWS or MAPI are not the ...

One of the most important learning points when thinking about programing or designing Transport agents is to understand the different between a P1 (Delivery Envelope) and P2 (Display Envelope) The P1 (Delivery Envelope) contains the recipient To and From information that is transmitted to the MTA server be it Exchange or any other SMTP server in the SMTP conversation and is the actual information that will be used for delivery of the message. Eg the Evaluating MTA will only examine the P1 recipients to determine what recipients a message would be delivered to. The P2(Display Envelope) contains all the information that that the user will see when they receive the message this includes the From, To ,CC and Subject of a message. The important point to understand is that the MTA that is processing the message doesn’t look at these headers to determine whom to deliver the message to. BCC’s One of the things that confuses a lot of people when they look at messages via an API or within an Tr...

On a Exchange 2007 and 2010 when changes are made to the Out of Office setting these changes are logged into an Item sitting in the Non_IPM_Subtree folder of a mailbox which has a message class of IPM.Microsoft.OOF.Log . The log of changes is written to the body of this message and can be useful if for any reason you need a historical record of the oof setting for a particular mailbox. For instance if someone set an inappropriate OOF message and you need some evidence of this. You could also sequence this data to get picture over a certain time period of what users had their oof set and for how long it was enabled and did it say anything useful. I've put together a script to show how to get at this log using the EWS Managed API and powershell and I've also included a parser to parse the log entries into an object to make it easier to export this data to csv or email etc. I've put a download of this script here the script itself looks like $MailboxName = "user@domain...

In Exchange 2007 and 2010 all mail that is sent and received must transit its way through a Hub server where if your a developer you can create a transport agent to perform additional tasks on those messages before the are passed out of your org or into a mailbox. Sometimes these tasks may involve custom mapi properties that you may have created by using customized forms in Outlook or OWA or possibly a custom EWS application. When it comes to accessing these custom properties in a Transport Agent it involves using the TNEFReader in a transport agent to parse TNEF part of a message. TNEF for those uninitiated stands for Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format which is a serialization format that Exchange uses to send the Mapi properties of a Item via email there is a protocol document that covers this http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc425498%28v=EXCHG.80%29.aspx . What the TNEFReader does is allows a Transport Agent to parse all the different property structures and data-types co...

Invalid delegates have always been a tricky issue in Exchange an Invalid delegate happens when a mailbox that has a delegate setup and the delegate user account is deleted or disabled(has the Exchange attributes removed). When your using the EWS delegate operations and a mailbox has an invalid delegate you get a message back to tell you the delegate doesn't map to an active directory user however it doesn't tell you who that user was and what type of delegate access that user had. You also can't use the EWS delegate operations to remove a user in this state so you end up with a kind of stalemate solution that requires a manual delete with Outlook. Before going any further its worth covering briefly what happens when you add a delegate to mailbox within Oultook there are three areas of the delegator's mailbox that gets modified. Local freebusy object in the mailbox Permissions on folders that are given access to Rules collection if forward meeting requests option se...

This has taken me a little longer then expected to update but I've finally created a version 2 of my simple powershell client script i posted here . Firstly if you missed it the new version the EWS Managed API 1.1 has been released which allows you to access all the new 2010 SP1 functionality like archive mailboxes, dumpster v2 etc you can download this from here the new script requires this library. The new features I've added to the script is firstly there is a Entry Point box that allows you to select what entry point you want. The Non IPM Root is usefull if you want to look at the dumpster folders or other things in the Non_IPM_Root, Archive root takes you into the Archive mailbox if its exists for that user. Another new edition is the ItemType box which allows you the select between being able to view the Normal Mailbox Items, FAI (Folder Associated Items) or Deleted Items (not really applicable for Dumpster v2). Lastly because the new script is built for use with Window...

Recipient policies where first introduced in Exchange 2003 and later became email address policies in Exchange 2007 where we where all introduced to the joys and sorrows of Opath. While policies are a simple idea and a good method to do this type of thing the complexities of what happens underneath can be hard to get your head around and test and this can at times lead to the odd mistake. While there is a preview box when your modifying an Address list policy if you wanted to look at the bigger picture of the filter that the address policy represents as it is and could be applied to active directory objects, this is where it can be useful to use a script. The other thing to take into account when looking a policies is the objects where the application of the address policies have been disabled. So what I've done is build a GUI to help this the first thing this script does is enumerate all the policy objects and retrieve the following properties that are associated with these objec...

If your unaware there is nasty mass mailer virus outbreak at the moment if you haven't already i would strongly urge you to visit and implement the measures in http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/worm-win32-visal-b.aspx The above gives the best and quickest method for cleaning the affects of an outbreak using the EMS export-mailbox cmdlet but i thought I'd give some alternate methods using EWS . I can't guarantee any of these methods like i would with Export-mailbox and I would expect them to be slower (and possibly very slow) but they may come in use especially if your access is limited but you can use EWS Impersonation or if you looking to do some reporting based on subject. Finding Items based on there Subject is relatively simple in EWS and involves the use of a Search filter or if your lucky enough to be using Exchange 2010 you can make use of AQS which I blogged about earlier here . With a virus outbreak they generally start on a particular ...

One of the things missing from the standard folder properties when you use EWS to access a mailbox or public folder is the size of the folder. Those that have used other API's to do mailbox and public folder size reporting should already know about the extended mapi property PR_Extended_Message_Size this is what you also need to use in EWS to get the folder size to define this in C# you can use ExtendedPropertyDefinition PR_Extended_Message_Size = new ExtendedPropertyDefinition(3592, MapiPropertyType.Long); PropertySet psPropertySet = new PropertySet(BasePropertySet.FirstClassProperties) { PR_Extended_Message_Size }; Folder Inbox = Folder.Bind(service, WellKnownFolderName.Inbox, psPropertySet); Object FolderSize = null; if (Inbox.TryGetProperty(PR_Extended_Message_Size, out FolderSize)) { Console.WriteLine(FolderSize); } You can also make use of this in a script if you want an alternative to Ge...

On Exchange servers pre Exchange 2010 when someone deletes an Item in Exchange it goes via the dumpster 1.0. Which is explained in http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/09/25/452632.aspx as " essentially a view stored per folder. Items in the dumpster (henceforth known as Dumpster 1.0) stay in the folder where they were soft-deleted (shift-delete or delete from Deleted Items) and are stamped with the ptagDeletedOnFlag flag. " . Being able to report on the items that are stored in these views can be useful for a number of auditing and admin reasons. With Exchange Web Services you query the items stored in these views using a SoftDeleted traversal of the folder in question. This works well for items that are stored in the dumpster of a normal mailbox folder but there is a problem when you have a hierarchy of folders that gets deleted. When this happens you can only query the first of the deleted hierarchy using a soft deleted traversal and the findfolders operation. W...

Last month i posted a script for getting the Iphone IOS version information for all users on a server using the Get-ActiveSyncDeviceStatistics cmdlet which worked okay but had one major flaw in that it doesn't pick up the updates to the O/S as pointed out in http://www.hedonists.ca/2010/07/22/blocking-the-iphone-part-i. So the only 100% way would be to parse the IIS logs where you can grab the same information about the devices as long as the cs-useragent is being include in the logs (if not you need to change this). This script is still useful for somethings and hopefully i should be able to re-purpose this to do something useful. There are good and bad things about parsing logs, the good is that this technique should work on any version of Exchange including 2003 the bad is that if your log files are large then there are much better ways then using Powershell to parse them (such as logparser). But using PS does have a number of advantages and if your whiling to wait while the s...

I recently switched to a new Laptop which had Windows7 which left me in a little bit of a hole as to how i could get access to some old email which i needed rather urgently that was located in a dbx file from a previous laptop where I had been using Outlook Express for a number of years. I found http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/convert_oe.htm which had a acceptable method of doing this but I thought I'd like to push this email into a Exchange Mailbox anyway so i decided to see if i could do this programmaticly. Turns out there is no real API that makes access t0 DBX files easy however a few people over the years have come up with methods to access these files, there is a PHP dbxparser which someone has also ported to C# on code-project here this was enough information to allow me to build a simple DLL that i could then use in Powershell to extract email and then using some simple code to upload the email into Exchange using the MIMEContent upload technique with EWS. In the end t...

Update ** There is one problem with the script in this post in that its doesn't pick up the updates to the O/S as pointed out in http://www.hedonists.ca/2010/07/22/blocking-the-iphone-part-i . So the only 100% way would be to parse the IIS logs where you can grab the same information about the devices. I'll try to post a script that does parsing that should work on 2003 up. Thanks also to Dennis who sent another version of the script I've added to the download that give enhanced reporting** ** New scripted posted for IIS logs http://gsexdev.blogspot.com/2010/08/parsing-iis-log-activesync-traffic-for.html ** On January 9, 2007 Apple released their first iphone and unleashed on the world what is arguably one of the most successful user mobile devices on the planet (I'm not arguing technical merit here just end user experience). Kind of like a virus these phones have spread throughout corporations and into every nook and cranny some with the IT departments blessing othe...