Does your company use Outlook email forwarding? As your organisation has grown, have the rules become hard to manage?

We have a customer using Exchange Server for a few dozen users. They use mailbox rules so they can delegate various activities when staff are out of the office. Occasionally they lose track of what’s being forwarded, and it’s a pain to get this information from each user one by one. Here’s a little PowerShell script I threw together to automate it. I ran this on their server from the “Exchange Management Shell”. It’s my first PowerShell script ever; I’m used to Linux shell scripts and up till now haven’t made complex scripts under Windows. That may change:

PowerShell Script to list Outlook mailbox rules for users in an organisation

$users = get-mailbox

ForEach ($user in $users)
{
        $rules = get-InboxRule -Mailbox $user.name
        if ($rules.length -gt 0) {
                echo ""
                echo $user.name
                echo ""
                $rules | select name, priority, description | fl
                echo ""
        }
}

Save this in a file with the extension “ps1” (that’s a one on the end) and run it from PowerShell to get the output – use > to redirect to a file if necessary. If you put the script in the current directory, you may need to explicitly specify the path, for example: .\run.ps1 > rules.txt Note that this only shows the server-side rules, such as placing messages in a folder, forwarding, etc. Anything that interacts with the client machine such as a popup will not appear in this report – this suits our customer because they want the rules to work when a user is not even logged in. The customer is pleased they can see the server-side rules in one report, and I’ve learned that it’s not just Linux that can support powerful scripting!