We get a lot of email where I work. A metric butt-ton.

One of the things I’d like to be able to do is access that email programmatically, in order to extract production processing reports for further analysis.

As a first step, I went looking for a way to access the Inbox using PowerShell. I found a post on Microsoft’s Hey, Scripting Guy blog: Use PowerShell to Data Mine Your Outlook Inbox.

There was just one problem – when I tried the steps to access the Inbox, I got a major error:

PS C:\Windows\system32> add-type -assembly “Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook”
PS C:\Windows\system32> $olFolders = “Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.olDefaultFolders” -as [type]
PS C:\Windows\system32> $outlook = new-object -comobject outlook.application
new-object : Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {0006F03A-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} failed due to the following error: 80080005 Server execution failed (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80080005 (CO_E_SERVER_EXEC_FAILURE)). At line:1 char:12 + $outlook = new-object -comobject outlook.application + ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ + CategoryInfo : ResourceUnavailable: (:) [New-Object], COMException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : NoCOMClassIdentified,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.NewObjectCommand

I searched for “NoCOMClassIdentified” and found a couple of references. I finally found one (I don’t have the link, alas) that helped me realize the problem was that I was running it from a PowerShell session that I’d opened as Administrator (for teh POWER!!!).

When I opened PowerShell as myself, I was able to complete the sequence to access the 60,000+ messages in my Inbox (did I mention we get a LOT of email here?), and use a quick pipe to Where-Object to extract just the emails I sent to myself:

PS P:\> Add-Type -Assembly “Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook”
PS P:\> $olfolders = “Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.olDefaultFolders” -as [type]
PS P:\> $outlook = new-object -comobject outlook.application
PS P:\> $namespace = $outlook.GetNameSpace(“MAPI”)
PS P:\> $folder = $namespace.getDefaultFolder($olFolders::olFolderInBox)
PS P:\> $folder.items | Select-Object -Property Subject, ReceivedTime, Importance, SenderName |
>>  Where-Object {$_.SenderName -like “Spurlock*”}Subject ReceivedTime Importance SenderName
——- ———— ———- ———-
How to send an email from … 10/23/2014 7:01:29 PM 1 Spurlock, Edward (Austin)
RE: How to send an email f… 10/23/2014 7:06:15 PM 1 Spurlock, Edward (Austin)
PowerShell script to updat… 10/28/2014 6:17:21 PM 1 Spurlock, Edward (Austin)
RE: PowerShell script to u… 10/28/2014 6:25:15 PM 1 Spurlock, Edward (Austin)

Accessing email through Outlook works, but according to Bill Long’s Exchange Blog, using the Exchange Web Services (EWS) Managed API for PowerShell scripting offers a number of advantages. For one, you can access Exchange data from a system that does not have Outlook installed. Another advantage is being able to do “ranged retrievals” – accessing a subset of the data on each retrieval, rather than having to pull everything down at once and sort it out (as I did with Where-Object).