Skip to main content

Simple Exchange Email client for Powershell using the EWS Managed API

** Updated download to fix issue with 2010 SP1, self signed certs and search ***

One thing that is useful now and again when you are testing different problems and configurations on Exchange is to have a Mail client that isn’t Outlook or OWA. Back in the days there used to be a Simple Mapi client called the Exchange client which disappeared after 5.0. While this isn’t a attempt to replace it or to be an end user mail client at all it’s a great little test bench script that allows you to get in and look at mailbox and the items in that mailbox, Download attachments,export single emails, look at Message headers, search for emails and if there is any particular problem you want to tackle in regards to certain properties it’s something that can be very easily adapted to fit an specific problem.

How it works

This script presents a Winform GUI that allows you to interact with a mailbox and present it into a displayable view back to a user. Okay I could go on like this all day (seriously!!) this is actually what it looks like when you fire it up.



First you need to put the Email address of the mailbox you want to open then click open mailbox it will then attempt to do an autodiscover. Why Autodiscover is great it doesn’t always work so there is the ability to put the CAS URL for ews eg
“https://servername.com/ews/exchange.asmx”.

Use default credentials means the script will try to use the currently logged on user when accessing the mailbox otherwise you can fill in the credential settings.

When you hit the open mailbox button the script does a Deep folder Traversal starting at the Mailbox root and then builds a foldertree of the result. An event is added to the folder tree so when you click any of the leaves it will fire an event that then does a Findfolder operation to retrieve items from the selected folder. It will only return the number of items listed in the number box which is 100 by default so if you where to click the inbox it will only return the first 100 items if you want it to return more or less you need to change this number value. The search functions allow you to refine which items are returned or you can create different searches based on From, Subject and Body it does a Substring search when you select each of these properties. The search works by building the correct searchfilter string based on the dropdown value you select and the text that’s entered in the text box.

The ShowMessage button does a Get-Item operation and retrieves the message and body as Text and displays the result. The Show header lets you look at the Message header and the download Attachment and export message allows you to download message and attachments which I've described in another post here.

There is really on two requirements for this script the first is you need the have the EWS Managed API installed which you can download from here.The only other requirement is to have Powershell.

I've put a download of this script here

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-

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

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
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.