Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

Although there are a few better methods of doing this these days this is still handy to have especially if your running older versions of Exchange or you want to audit the raw ACE's that are being added by RBAC in Exchange 2010. Extended rights get used for a number of things EWS Impersonation is one, SendAs is another anyway here's an old C# sample I tripped over today. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Collections; using System.Security.AccessControl; using System.DirectoryServices; namespace showImpRights { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { DirectoryEntry rootdse = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://RootDSE"); DirectoryEntry cfg = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://" + rootdse.Properties["configurationnamingcontext"].Value); DirectoryEntry exRights = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://cn=Extended-rig...

Search folders in Exchange make searching for items in multiple folders a little more easier and/or allows you to group and find email with certain properties easier eg things like Unread email, Flagged for followup etc. Outlook 2010 makes use of these features for To-Do list etc. One useful search folder that gets created by Outlook 2010 when its used against a Exchange 2010 server is the AllItems search folder. eg this one This is a search folder that gets created in the NON_IPM_Subtree folder and essentially allows you to do a generic search of all the folders within a Mailbox. This can be useful in a powershell script if you do need to enumerate every item within a mailbox to use the Allitems search folder you first need to do a search for this search folder in the Mailbox Root and then you can use some normal findItems enumeration code. To filter a findfolders operation to only return search folders you can use the PR_Folder_Type extended property if this property is set to 2 then...

When it comes to scripting Exchange autodiscover can be a great source for all types of configuration information about an Exchange mailbox and in 2010 it now returns a lot more information about a users mailbox. The EWS Managed API 1.1 provides some new objects that allows a more granular use of Autodiscover which can be helpful in different situations for example during migrations where DNS records for autodiscover may not exist or point to different server etc. To look at one example lets take Office365 if you want to connect to mailboxes in the Exchange Online cloud using EWS but DNS isn't setup your hosted domain for autodiscover you could use the following script to discover the EWS URL to use. $mailbox = "glen@mydomain.inthecloudblah.com" [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::ServerCertificateValidationCallback = {$true } $dllpath = "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange\Web Services\1.1\Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.dll" [void][Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFile(...

When you’re looking at automating Office365 and Exchange Online from managed code you need to be aware of the 2 sets of cmdlets that you may need to use depending on the tasks that your trying to perform. Most of the administration of ExchangeOnline is done using remote powershell where Exchange Online provides a subset of the normal on-premise Exchange 2010 SP1 cmdlets. The other cmdlet set to be aware of is the MSOnline powershell module which you need download and install http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-enterprises/hh124998.aspx . The MSOnline module contains cmdlets to allow administration of the wider Office365 service and perform more of the directory/service and service provider functions more akin to Active directory management in a on premise environment (eg adding users to groups etc). So when using this from Managed code to use Remote powershell against Exchange Online you use the standard code you would use against an on-premise Exchange 2010 deployment aga...

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...