Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

 One of the more complex things to migrate in EWS when migrating to the Graph API is any directory access code that uses one of the following EWS operations FindPeople ResolveName ExpandGroup (ExpandDL) or if your using OnPrem you maybe using System.DirectoryServices to do direct LDAP requests of Active Directory. With the Microsoft Graph API these Directory based mail operations don't exist, because you have full access to the underlying AzureAD, so in theory everything should be achievable without these type of operations. For the most part this is correct where is starts to get a little grayer is around this like Address Lists and Exchange recipient types mostly because the Graph doesn't expose the following underlying Active Directory properties msExchRecipientDisplayType msExchRecipientTypeDetails msExchRemoteRecipientType so this can be a limitation if your migrating from LDAP code and some FindPeople implementations if your searching based on AddressList. Microsoft Grap...

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...

One of the email UI features that I find the most useful in Outlook on the Web and Outlook mobile is the People favorites feature which saves having to do a search for historical email from particular high use contacts. Favorites is a feature that has evolved especially in Outlook on the web and Outlook mobile eg People/Persona favorites and category favorites. The way this is implemented in the Mailbox is interesting eg   People/Persona favorites get their own search folder under the favoritePersonas Folder in the Non_IPM_Subtree in a Mailbox eg As well as a configuration object under the  \ApplicationDataRoot\32d4b5e5-7d33-4e7f-b073-f8cffbbb47a1\outlookfavorites eg The configuration object is of interest as this tells as a lot about what type of favorites are being created and used in a Mailbox. It also can serve in a custom app if you want to reproduce the same type of favorites folder tree (you will need to use EWS for this as the Graph API is unfortunately hamstrung ...

As the information on how to do this would cover multiple posts, I've bound this into a series of mini post docs in my GitHub Repo to try and make this subject a little easier to understand and hopefully navigate for most people.   The Binder index is  https://gscales.github.io/Graph-Powershell-101-Binder/   The topics covered are How you can access the Recoverable Items Folders (and get the size of these folders)  How you can access and search for items in the Deletions and Purges Folders and also how you can Export an item to an Eml from that folder How you can Restore a Deleted Item back to the folder it was deleted from (using the Last Active Parent FolderId) and the sample script is located  https://github.com/gscales/Powershell-Scripts/blob/master/Graph101/Dumpster.ps1

Searching on the Categories property of an Email can pose a challenge because this property is a Multi-valued String property (which aren't that common in email) eg in a Message the property may look like the following So this needs to be queried in a different way then a normal String or single valued property in an Email would, where you could use a number of filter options (eg equal, contains,startswith). In EWS it was only possible to query this property using AQS because of the way SearchFilters translated to the underlying ROP based restrictions used by the Exchange Mailbox Store. In the Microsoft Graph the Linq format in Filters does translate more favourably so can be used eg the following simple query can find Messages in a folder based on a specific category https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/messages?filter=Categories/any(a:a+eq+'Green+Category') you can create a SearchFolder based on this query which would search all folder in a Mailbox which would produce...

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...

This is part 2 of my Graph Basic's series and this post is born out of an actual need that I had over the last week which was to get a user photo from the Microsoft Graph and save it as a custom size and different image type. Like many things there are multiple ways of doing this but the Microsoft Graph GetPhoto endpoint  is pretty straight forward and delivers the image in one of the following formats 48x48, 64x64, 96x96, 120x120, 240x240, 360x360, 432x432, 504x504, and 648x648. Because I wanted to use the photo on a Elgato stream deck  this required the size be 72x72 so I needed some extra code to do the resize of the photo and change the format from a jpeg to png. Getting the user-photo from the Microsoft Graph  Before you can get the user's photo from Microsoft Graph you need to make sure the application registration you are using has one of the following permissions User.Read, User.ReadBasic.All, User.Read.All, User.ReadWrite, User.ReadWrite.All Then after you have o...

MFA (Multi Factor Authentication) is great at making the Authentication process more secure in Exchange Online but can be challenging in Automation scenarios. I originally wrote this code for something that I wanted to run unattended on a RasberryPi that was running PowerShell that i wanted to use MFA on and where i wanted to avoid going down the path of using the 90 day RefreshToken/device code method and I also didn't want to use App Authentication via Certificates or Client Secrets. Interestingly while i was writing this post Microsoft just announced Certificate based Modern Auth in Exchange Online PowerShell  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/modern-auth-and-unattended-scripts-in-exchange-online-powershell/ba-p/1497387   .  This article also links to the Secure App Model  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/partnercenter/multi-factor-auth?view=partnercenterps-3.0#exchange  which is the way Microsoft are recommending you handle...

I haven't done a basics series for a while but based on some of the questions I've been getting lately and the lack of some good Mailbox specific examples for basic but more complex tasks using the Graph against Exchange Online Mailboxes this seemed like a good series to write. For all the scripts in this series I'm not going to use any modules or other libraries so everything will be using Invoke-WebRequest and Invoke-RestMethod, while there is nothing wrong with using libraries or modules and a number of advantages in doing so it just keeps the examples as simple and easy to understand as they can be. Authentication  You can't have an article on the Graph without talking about authentication and we are now far from the past where all you needed was a simple username and password and you where off to the races. The basics of Authentication are is that first you will need an Azure App Registration (that has been consented to), there are many pages dedicated to how you c...

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...

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 ...