We all know how crucial a messaging service is to most organizations. With the exception of maybe telephones, businesses today rely on email and messaging systems more than any other piece of infrastructure. Every Exchange administrator knows the importance of continuously monitoring Exchange, not only to prevent downtime and quickly fix problems after they occur, but also to be aware of the health of the infrastructure and to help identify potential problems and performance degradations before they turn into problems and cause downtime.
Monitoring solutions like Microsoft’s System Center Operations Manager, SolarWinds, Nagios, MailScape, etc., are just some examples of monitoring tools for Exchange. However, some organizations do not provide access to these tool’s consoles or dashboards outside the internal network. So what happens if an administrator is out and about without anything other than his/her phone and needs to check if this user has gone over their quota and cannot send emails, on which server a particular database is mounted, or even if ServerA has just been rebooted?
These type of situations might be rare, but I have personally been there and it would have been extremely useful if I could send an email to my mailbox with a particular PowerShell cmdlet and get the output of that cmdlet back. And this is what this article is about. We will develop two basic scripts that will monitor incoming emails between two users (for security reasons), run the cmdlet(s) in the email’s subject and reply with the output from that same cmdlet. The first script will use Message Tracking Logs while the second Exchange Web Services (EWS).
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