Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

The "Tag for external email messages received" feature was introduced into Office365 recently to help people better to identify mail that comes from external sender vs internal sender see this for more info on this feature . What happens when you enable this feature is that for messages with External sender a new Mapi property is set on those messages eg For messages from internal senders the property doesn't appear to get set and if the feature isn't enabled in your tenant then you won't see this property either. You can negate the boolean value of the property which will turn off the external tag. Using it in the Microsoft Graph API If you want to use it in the Microsoft Graph API when you retrieve messages you can include this as a SingleValueExtendedProperties eg for Retrieving and filtering message you can use I've included this in my Get LastEmail 101 graph sample  if you want to try this in a real mailbox eg you can do  Get-LastEmail -InternalSender -M...

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...

As well as EWS and Remote PowerShell (RPS) other mail protocols POP3, IMAP and SMTP have had OAuth authentication enabled in Exchange Online (Official announcement here ). A while ago I created  this script that used Opportunistic TLS to perform a Telnet style test against a SMTP server using SMTP AUTH. Now that oAuth authentication has been enabled in office365 I've updated this script to be able to use oAuth instead of SMTP Auth to test against Office365. I've also included a function to actually send a Message. Token Acquisition  To Send a Mail using oAuth you first need to get an Access token from Azure AD there are plenty of ways of doing this in PowerShell. You could use a library like MSAL or ADAL (just google your favoured method) or use a library less approach which I've included with this script . Whatever way you do this you need to make sure that your application registration  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/quickstart-re...

A while ago I published this post on accessing the Graph directly from an Arduino, this made use of the "resource owner password credentials grant" (meaning it used a hard coded username and password). Once you have enabled MFA (multi factor authentication) on an account this grant no longer works because you have no ability to provide the other factors for the Authentication to succeed.  For devices like Arduino's or most IOT devices that have very limited UI capabilities this is where device code authentication can be used. The way Device Code Authentication works is instead of posting the user credentials to the token endpoint to get an access token, you make a post first to the /v2.0/devicecode endpoint which will then give you a specific user code to use to authenticate with on another device. You then visit http://microsoft.com/devicelogin (on a pc or mobile device) enter the user code and authenticate as the required user doing any extra MFA authentication. In ...

I've done some updating of my ExchangeContacts PowerShell module to support the following Modern Authentication in Office365 (distributing the ADAL dll with this module) Compiled and distributed the latest version of the EWS Managed API from GitHub with the module New cmdlet Export-EXCContacts that supports exporting all contacts in a Folder to a single VCF File New cmdlet Export-EXCContacts that supports exporting all contacts to a CSV file (this was already possible with the ExportFolder cmdlet but this is a slightly enhanced format) New cmldet Export-EXCRootContacts lets you export the Non_IPM Subtree folders that contain contacts. (Some of these are created by the Office365 substrate process) for example mycontacts, AllContacts, ContactSearch folders etc. Include dedup code based on Email Address in this cmdlet This is already supported but I wanted to show how you can export the Hidden Contacts Folder likes Recipient Cache, Gal and Organizational Contacts New cmdlet ...

Calendaring formats in Messaging Clients tend to all follow much the same approach whether its Outlook, Outlook on the Web or Mobile, Gmail or Microsoft Teams .  Like email data, calendar data can be random and complex in its volume and type (recurring appointments etc) so a simple year at a glance calendar for someone designing a mass market client is hard to do well for all the data types and volumes that you could encounter, therefor its not something you see in mail clients by default (lets face it who wants to support that). In the absence of year at a glance calendars  I was surprised to see people using Excel to create yearly aggregated calendars in Microsoft Teams for events (for data that already existed in shared Calendars). But more surprisingly is that it actually kind of worked well when there wasn't a lot of data that needed to be shown. The one thing that sprang to my mind was if you could automate this it  would be really good for people who use the Bir...

Mailbox Change discovery is the process of looking at any folders or items that are new or have been modified recently in a Mailbox. Its useful in a number of different ways including (but not limited to) Looking at what objects a third party Addin is creating or modifying in your mailbox Help to work out which FAI (Folder Associated Item) is being modified when changes are made to the configuration in Outlook or Outlook on the Web (this can be useful if you then want to automate those changes in your own scripts) Fixing client issues caused by corrupt or bad items (eg if you've ever used MFCMapi to delete and Item that's causing a particular client function not to work correctly) Getting an understanding of how the backend scaffolding of new features work in Outlook on the Web (eg looking at what the substrate Is doing in Office365)  If you have ever looked recently at the Non_IPM Root folder of any Office365 Mailbox you can see by the large number of folders that are...