We have a process by which notifications of new users in another system, that need to get created in ours are sent via Email to a standalone inbox.  The new user emails have to be read and entered into the system based on the information provided (Name, and Email).  We get 10-20 a week, and the UI for which we enter these users into is very slow – so its a big time waster.  I decided to waste even more time automating this so I NEVER HAVE TO DO IT AGAIN!

I decided PowerShell would be the natural choice, there appear to be tools specifically for Exchange/Office365 called Exchange Management Tools/Exchange Management Console which have to be installed – so my goal was to not use any cmdlets that appear to make things really easy.

The steps that need to  happen are:

• Check inbox for un-read messages matching a particular subject
• Verify the email message is a new created user (there are updates and removals – purely notification) by checking the message body.
• Parse out the email address and name from the email message body
• Add the user to our system (using an in-house Python REST utitlity)
• Archive the email into a specific folder for these requests.

Connect to the Inbox

In the below, $s becomes your Exchange “Service” object.  The one dependency is having the Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices dll available – this you can download http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35371, then it can be loaded locally as a .NET assembly.

The other trick is the Exchange web-service endpoint for Office365 https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx.

$inbox becomes the Inbox object itself.

[Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFile("C:Program FilesMicrosoftExchangeWeb Services1.2Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.dll")
$s = New-Object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ExchangeService([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ExchangeVersion]::Exchange2007_SP1)
$s.Credentials = New-Object Net.NetworkCredential('inboxusername@xyzcorp.com', 'P@$$Word', 'xyzcorp.com')
$s.Url = new-object Uri("https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx");
$inbox = [Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.Folder]::Bind($s,[Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.WellKnownFolderName]::Inbox)

Find Folder for Completed Requests

Doing this now to set up the source and destination folders before we go play with  messages, here we create a folder view, and SearchFilter object to find the specific folder by name.  I’m assuming its returned and its the first item in the FolderView collection.

$fv = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.FolderView(20)
$fv.Traversal = "Deep"

$ffname = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.SearchFilter+ContainsSubstring([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.FolderSchema]::DisplayName,"Completed Items")

$folders = $s.findFolders([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.WellKnownFolderName]::MsgFolderRoot,$ffname, $fv)
$completedfolder = $folders.Folders[0]

 Search Inbox for Un-read request Messages

Next we’ll search the Inbox for unread messages matching the subject line.  I also need to check for text in the message body to confirm its an add and not an update user request – but I found it difficult to do so at this point, instead I’ll do it as I process each message.  I’m using a SearchFilterCollection, which for both SearchFilter and SearchFilterCollection have interesting syntax within Powershell http://blogs.msdn.com/b/akashb/archive/2011/12/01/searching-contacts-using-ews-managed-api-1-1-from-powershell-impersonation-searchfiltercollection-containssubstring.aspx and http://gsexdev.blogspot.com/2009/06/using-searchfilter-and-other-nested.html

$iv = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ItemView(50)
$inboxfilter = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.SearchFilter+SearchFilterCollection([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.LogicalOperator]::And)
$ifisread = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.SearchFilter+IsEqualTo([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.EmailMessageSchema]::IsRead,$false)
$ifsub = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.SearchFilter+ContainsSubstring([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.EmailMessageSchema]::Subject,"User Profile Sync")
$inboxfilter.add($ifisread)
$inboxfilter.add($ifsub)
$msgs = $s.FindItems($inbox.Id, $inboxfilter, $iv)

Read and process emails

$msgs now contains all the unread messages matching our subject line.  Now we have to process them all, there is a trick to getting certain properties of the message – for which we apply a PropertySet to the ItemView of messages.  I also include a user-defined function that parses out text from the email in a simple “Name: Value” format.  Based on the values parsed out of the email I will call a python script that makes the proper API call.  I’m also writing out each user to a csv just for records.

$psPropertySet = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.PropertySet([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.BasePropertySet]::FirstClassProperties)
$psPropertySet.RequestedBodyType = [Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.BodyType]::Text;

$s.LoadPropertiesForItems($msgs,$psPropertySet)

function getEmailField($msg, $field){
	$value = ""
	$pattern = "(?<=" + $field + ":s)[^s]+"
	return ([regex]::matches($msg, $pattern) | %{$_.value})
}
foreach ($msg in $msgs.Items)
{

	If ($msg.Subject -eq "User Profile Sync" -and $msg.Body.Text -match "is created"){
	# double-check the subject (left over), check message body for text indicating new user
		$body = $msg.Body.Text
		$name = (getEmailField -msg $body -field "FirstName")  + " " + (getEmailField -msg $body -field "LastName" )
		$email = getEmailField -msg $body -field "EMailID"
		($name + "," + $email ) >> ".newusers.csv"

                #call ptyhon script, wait for it to complete
		$adduser = Start-Process 'python' -ArgumentList "adduser.py $email ""$name"" $email" -wait -passthru
		do {start-sleep -Milliseconds 500}
		until ($adduser.HasExited)

		# move message to previously located destination folder, then mark as read.
		$msg.Move($completedfolder.Id)
		$msg.IsRead = $true
		write-host "Added $email to system, archived email"
	}

}

I can now schedule this locally, or set it up on a windows machine somewhere as long as I package it with our Python utility, and the Exchange Web Services dll.