Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

*update* I suggest checking out Michael Smith's RDO port of this script which is a much more developed examples http://theessentialexchange.com/blogs/michael/archive/2009/10/16/exporting-mailboxes-larger-than-2-gb-on-an-exchange-server.aspx . *update* I have a small customer with an old server that recently had a staff member leave who had a very large mailbox over 5 GB. Now these guys are pretty tight still using Exchange 2000 and Office 2000 and don’t want to upgrade software or hardware so getting rid of this mailbox out the Exchange store while still giving people occasionally access to this mailbox was desirable and also challenging. Because all the clients are using Outlook 2000 I’m stuck with the 2 GB PST non-Unicode file limit which Exmerge is similarly afflicted with. Using Exmerge with date filters was one possible solution but I decided I’d rather just do a liner export where mail was exported one item at a time and would just span to the next PST when the space was ex...

Anyone who has every tried to send an attachment using WebDAV will know that it is a real pain compared with CDOSYS/CDOEX where it was generally just one line of code. The new Exchange Web Services fall somewhere in the middle of these two while not a simple 1 line of code the functionality is there it is just not immediately easy to work out how to do it. Here are two methods I’ve found that work if you want to send a message with an attachment (or just create an item or attach something to an already existing item). Note there are probably some other methods you can use but hopefully this is a little more helpful then just the XML in the current SDK. The first method is to create an item in a folder (eg the drafts folder) using a createitem operation then using the itemid and changeid returned from the create item request use the createattachment operation to attach the file to the new item you created. Then using the new changeid returned after the createattachment operation use a s...

This is one that came up for me this week where for audit purposes all communication between a certain email domain needed to be found and exported in a Exchange Store. I all ready had the bones for this script in one of my other posts all I needed to do was adapt this by adding in some code to retrieve the fromemail and the to properties and then do a substring search of both of these properties. If a match is found the email is then exported by using WebDAV to get the stream of the item and then using an ADO stream to write the stream to a normal EML file that can then be opened in any mail client. The script works using WebDAV and it connects to and scans every mailbox using the Admin virtual root which means the script can run with delegated Exchange admin rights. The first part of the script contains some ADSI queries to work out what the URL to the admin root is and then calls the RecurseFolder sub this sub is based on the code from the mailbox size KB . With a few exceptions t...

One of the things that has been dropped from the GUI (Exchange Management Console) in Exchange 2007 is the ability to set the diagnostic level of different Exchange components. You now have to use the Exchange Management Shell cmdlets get-eventloglevel and set-eventloglevel. While functional if you have to enable a number of different categories if you are trying to diagnose certain problems it can be a little cumbersome to try and come up with a different command-line for each one of the possible 150 components you might want to change. Because I do tend to enable and disable these things a fair bit when trying to fix a problems or diagnose why a piece a code or script might not be working I thought I’d come up with a little Powershell winform that would give me a GUI to do this with and allow me to quickly set the diagnostic logging level on a number of components with a few clicks of the mouse. The script first starts by presenting a Winform to the user with one combo box which is ...

A lot of times when your evaluating or testing code you may want to create some temporary mailboxes very quickly to test this or that. In Exchange 2007 the Exchange Command Shell’s new-mailbox commandlet gives a quick way of doing this. But because of the complexities of actually creating a mailbox eg knowing the Conical name of the OU and the name of the database you want to put it into etc actually typing all these values isn’t a fast or easy task. If your scripting this its not such a big deal because when your creating the script you can just cut and paste the values into your script and then you can run the thing a number of times and not have to worry about it. The Exchange Management Console provides wizards to create a mailbox but like all wizards they are designed to be easy to use not fast. So what I decided to do was see if I could put together a small 1 page form that you could run from the Exchange Command shell that would allow me to quickly put in the information that I...

I’ve been playing around with the new Exchange 2007 Web Services and thought I would share a few scripts. With a lot of API’s being deemphasized or disappearing completely in Exchange 2007, Exchange Web Services are the brave new world that confronts people who want to develop applications that run against an Exchange 2007 server. Like any other WebService EWS allows you to invoke different methods which will perform specific tasks by sending SOAP messages that contain certain properties and then receiving specifically formatted responses. For a scripting point of view it’s pretty easy firstly you need to authenticate the default authentication is NTLM so there is no need to worry about FBA synthetic logons and then it’s just a matter of posting a XML formatted SOAP message. If your familiar with using WebDAV the underlying methods you use are the same but the requests and responses are very different. Lets start with a simple send email example. smSoapMessage = "<?xml versio...

This powershell script is a combination of some of my past scripts (in particular the DNS util script ) wrapped up in a nice little GUI with buttons to make it easy to use on a daily basis. What this script does is allows you to open a SMTP log file (or if you don’t want to read the whole log file just a certain number of lines from a file) and it will then parse that log file into a DataGrid on a Winform. You can then select a line in the datagrid and use one of the Buttons provided to perform different DNS test on that log file entry. The tests it can do are Reverse DNS query on the Source Mail server IP Address (from the log file) MX lookup of the parsed domain name from a RCPT or MAIL SMTP command SPF lookup of the parsed domain name from a RCPT or MAIL SMTP command A Record lookup of the parsed domain name from a RCPT or MAIL SMTP command RBL lookup of Source Mail Server IP Address (Using SORB’s or any other RBL you like). To configure which RBL server to use you need to modify th...