Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

Mail Addin's are a feature of Exchange and Office365 introduced first in 2013 as a way of having a unified Client App experience across Outlook, OWA and now the Outlook mobile clients (vs the old Com based addin which still works but in Outlook only). One of the new features in MailApps in Office365 is the ability to now use the Outlook REST endpoint (EWS has been available in Mail Addin's since release). While both EWS and REST are functionality the same (eg they both are Mailbox data API's) in terms of their use in a Mail Addin the REST API offers a faster and easier development experience over EWS. Primarily because in EWS you have to build your SOAP posts in XML and parse their results which if you have worked with XML in Javascript is never a trivial thing. REST on the other hand because your requests and responses are using JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) from a integration perspective this is easier to handle and debug in JavaScript which is the primary language yo...

The concept of digest emails is quite an old one, it is where you have one email that summarises the contents of many different items to essentially make your life a little easier to catch up on high volume Mailing lists or really anything else where you want to compress down the contents of many to one. Other things digests can be used for are summaries of Public Folders or Junk Mail or they could be used in Group, Team or Shared Mailboxes to enhanced the usability of these. Another common use if by email marketers so if you ever googled the subject you would have found a lot or material about creating  marking type email with digest contents using HTML tables. I always find these a good source of humour because anybody who has ever tried to make a digest email that looks good in every client factor probably has less hair then I do (which isn't much). In this post I'm going to look at how you can create a digest email in your OnPremise or Office365 Exchange infrastructure us...

Because of some recent changes Microsoft have been making to the way Messages are evaluated as spam especially around sending domains having SPF and DKIM records (and how aggressively SPAM/Fraud is evaluated) you may have noticed a spike in legitimate email ending up in the Junk Email folder. As a email user in general on all platforms I've gotten pretty lazy in checking Junk email and Spam folders because I find the software is pretty good at doing its job and I only venture in there occasionally or when I know something should have arrived but didn't. However in the last few months enough email is going into these folders on a constant basis that its starting to become a pain point. So I'd thought I put together a few posts on the different ways of reporting on items in a Junk Email folder using both the reporting cmdlets in the Exchange Online PowerShell and also the Mailbox API's and some of the new stuff in the Graph (which I'll cover in part 2). Many ways to...

Sentiment analysis which means looking at a block of text and telling if this is Negative or Positive (okay oversimplified but the Wikipedia page has a good basic introduction into this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis ) has been one of the standout applications of Machine learning for the last couple of years. If your a observer of what MAPI properties are available on Messages in your Inbox in Office365 like me you may have noticed a new one appear recently on some messages which is the Sentiment analysis of the body Text of an email eg Before I go any further everything I'm talking about in this post is from observation only and none of this as far as I know is documented anywhere. The entity extraction part of this is documented and is a relative new feature that can be used in Addin's (or other applications) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/add-ins/match-strings-in-an-item-as-well-known-entities . Entity extraction is one of those cool power u...

There's a old saying that a tradesmen is only as good as their tools and the same can be said for ITPro's and developers. You can save yourself a lot of time when investigating particular tasks you want a script by having something ready built that can do 90% of task at hand.  I've decided to share a script that I use quite often during the investigation phase of any EWS scripting tasks that allows you to generically grab a folder (or collection of Folders) and the Items within those folder. While this is something that can be put together quite quickly together using snippets there always tends to be extra properties that you need for different tasks so the generic script I'm showing today includes all the niceties kind of like having the right sized spanner rather the shifter. So the script in question can be found on GitHub here  https://github.com/gscales/Powershell-Scripts/blob/master/GenericFolderAndItem.ps1 So what can it do Connect and show the properties ...