Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

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...

Message classifications have been around since Exchange 2007 and are a feature of Exchange that allows you to setup your email system to add classification to messages to comply with e-mail policies and regulatory responsibilities that Governments and other bodies may require of an organization. If you want to set a message classification on a Message your sending pro-grammatically via EWS you need to first find out what the GUID of the classification you want to set is. There are a few ways of doing this the easiest is using the Get-MessageClassification cmdlet http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996911.aspx the value you will need for your app or script is the ClassificationID which represents the PidLidClassificationGuid Mapi property which if you’re playing around with Transport Agents this gets converted into the x-ms-exchange-organization-classification x-header. You can also grab it out of your classification xml file if you have deployed it to Outlook. All the propert...

When your dealing with Archive and Retention policies in Exchange 2010 one of the important questions to ask is what property is used to calculate the age of an Item. While it might be tempting to use some of the easy to get to datetime properties the important property to use in relation to Archive and Retention policies is the PidTagStartDateEtc property which is documented in http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee179537%28v=exchg.80%29.aspx. So as stated this is a composite property with the first 4 bytes belonging to the default retention period if it has been applied then the final 8 bytes gives the UTC Datetime from which the Message object's age is calculated. The following is a quick sample of how to extract this datetime from that property using the EWS Managed API. ExtendedPropertyDefinition PidTagStartDateEtc = new ExtendedPropertyDefinition(12315, MapiPropertyType.Binary); Object StartDate = null; itItem.TryGetProperty(PidTagStartDateEtc, out StartDate); long fileT...

Just a quick note to let everyone know who is interested in reading more about the search capabilities of Exchange Web Services against Exchange Online (Office 365) and Exchange 2010 Check out my article that's just been published on MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh148195%28v=EXCHG.140%29.aspx

While there are plenty of cmdlets within the Exchange Management Shell to calculate the Mailbox and Folder sizes and even Item sizes within public folders there is no cmdlets you can currently use to look at the age of the content within a mailbox to see how old it is and what affect an retention policy may have for example you may want to know how much data will be shifted to an archive store(Search-Mailbox kind of does it but...). To look at Mailbox Content the EWS Managed API provides a easy entry point and the flexibility to do this . On Exchange 2010 to scan for content between a particular date range using a Content Index query via Exchange Search is the quickest and most efficient way of querying this data. The EWS Managed API allows you to perform a CI search via Exchange Search using the AQS querystring overload parameter of the FindItems method see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee693615%28v=exchg.140%29.aspx . With AQS the operator .. can be used to search between...

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...