As an Exchange administrator, a long-standing source of frustration for me has been the fact that Microsoft does not provide tools for administratively inspecting and repairing delegate settings.  Apart from granting Full Access permissions on the mailbox and logging into it with Outlook, all an Exchange admin can really do is inspect the GrandSendOnBehalfTo attribute (a.k.a. publicDelegates), tinker with relevant folder sharing permissions, and use MfcMAPI to nuke the hidden delegate forwarding rule when it is misbehaving, which is rather drastic as it stops ALL delegate forwarding for that mailbox.

Well, there is another option: turning to (or building) the tools to do the job. A fine example of just such a tool is the MessageOps EWS PowerShell Module, which builds upon Exchange Web Services to add a host of Exchange commands to PowerShell, including tools for dealing with delegates.  While it is a fine tool which I’ve found quite useful, I got it into my head to write my own set of delegate management tools, if for no other reason than to get a better handle on how delegates actually work under the hood. In short, I’m a glutton for punishment, so I set about re-inventing the wheel…. Continue reading →