Skip to main content

EWS Snippets for PowerGui

Snippets are an idea that has been around in IDE environments for quite some time and can really be a time saver when it comes to writing EWS scripts. The following are the Snippets for PowerGUI that i presented in my MEC talk in September (Sorry I'm a little late in publishing these).

To use these snippits first you need to have powergui then you can download the Zip file that contains all the snippits from https://github.com/gscales/Powershell-Scripts/raw/master/ScriptArchive/ews-PowerGuiSnipits.zip . 

Once you have unzipped the files to a directory run the ./installsnippits.ps1 script from this directory which will create a snippits folder under %UserName%\My Documents\WindowsPowerShell and copy the snippits into this directory.

Using the Snippits is pretty easy but you do need to understand a little bit about building EWS scripts. The majority of the EWS scripts you create will have 4 major phases

1st Phase - Is to connect and authenticate to the CAS server, in this day and age you should have a proper SSL certificate and Autodiscover should be configured.  So in this first phase you need to acquire from somewhere the SMTPAddress of the mailbox you want to access and credentials for you to use to access the mailbox. Then perform a Autodiscover using the SMTPAddress and credentials you acquired which should then return the URL for EWS.

I've bundled this phase into the following snippit



The snippit will take the SMTPAddress as a cmdline parameter

$MailboxName = $args[0]

And also grab the credentials from the user (make sure you use the UPN as the username when it prompts)

$psCred = Get-Credential 
$creds = New-Object System.Net.NetworkCredential($psCred.UserName.ToString(),$psCred.GetNetworkCredential().password.ToString()) 
$service.Credentials = $creds     

2nd Phase - Now you have the URL for the CAS server to send your EWS request to, the next step is to bind to the folder you want to work with. For all the WellKnownFolders you can bind using the WellKnownFolder enum. I've bundled this phase together in another snippit for each folder for example to bind to the Inbox you use



If you wanted to instead bind to a Subfolder or user created folder I have another snippit for this phase which will bind to a folder using a path.





3rd Phase - Once you have the Folderid of the Folder you want to work with you can then either work with that folder or work with the Items in that folder so the snippit to use if you wish to Enumerate All Folder Items is (there are also several example of searches)




 With this snippit you need to replace the $Folder.Id with the Folder.Id from the other Snippit eg if you used

$folderid= new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.FolderId([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.WellKnownFolderName]::Inbox,$MailboxName)  
$Inbox = [Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.Folder]::Bind($service,$folderid)

You should then change

$fiItems = $service.FindItems($Folder.Id,$ivItemView)

to

$fiItems = $service.FindItems($Inbox.Id,$ivItemView)

4th Phase : There is no snippit for this but its basically where you put the code to process the Items eg you could output the Subject

    foreach($Item in $fiItems.Items){     
                $Item.Subject    
    }

or any of the other things I've listed in my other Howto http://gsexdev.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/ews-managed-api-and-powershell-how-to.html


That's it there are over 60 snippits altogether that I'll try to grow over time if you have any you want to include to help others out please send them to me and I'll include them.

Popular posts from this blog

Testing and Sending email via SMTP using Opportunistic TLS and oAuth in Office365 with PowerShell

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-register-

The MailboxConcurrency limit and using Batching in the Microsoft Graph API

If your getting an error such as Application is over its MailboxConcurrency limit while using the Microsoft Graph API this post may help you understand why. Background   The Mailbox  concurrency limit when your using the Graph API is 4 as per https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/throttling#outlook-service-limits . This is evaluated for each app ID and mailbox combination so this means you can have different apps running under the same credentials and the poor behavior of one won't cause the other to be throttled. If you compared that to EWS you could have up to 27 concurrent connections but they are shared across all apps on a first come first served basis. Batching Batching in the Graph API is a way of combining multiple requests into a single HTTP request. Batching in the Exchange Mail API's EWS and MAPI has been around for a long time and its common, for email Apps to process large numbers of smaller items for a variety of reasons.  Batching in the Graph is limited to a m

How to test SMTP using Opportunistic TLS with Powershell and grab the public certificate a SMTP server is using

Most email services these day employ Opportunistic TLS when trying to send Messages which means that wherever possible the Messages will be encrypted rather then the plain text legacy of SMTP.  This method was defined in RFC 3207 "SMTP Service Extension for Secure SMTP over Transport Layer Security" and  there's a quite a good explanation of Opportunistic TLS on Wikipedia  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunistic_TLS .  This is used for both Server to Server (eg MTA to MTA) and Client to server (Eg a Message client like Outlook which acts as a MSA) the later being generally Authenticated. Basically it allows you to have a normal plain text SMTP conversation that is then upgraded to TLS using the STARTTLS verb. Not all servers will support this verb so if its not supported then a message is just sent as Plain text. TLS relies on PKI certificates and the administrative issue s that come around certificate management like expired certificates which is why I wrote th
All sample scripts and source code is provided by for illustrative purposes only. All examples are untested in different environments and therefore, I cannot guarantee or imply reliability, serviceability, or function of these programs.

All code contained herein is provided to you "AS IS" without any warranties of any kind. The implied warranties of non-infringement, merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are expressly disclaimed.