Improving your Outlook with MFCMAPI (Or Email Admin's Intro to MFCMAPI)

The Email Admin - Troubleshooting Outlook Issues with MFCMAPI

"We’ve been covering a lot of new tools that Microsoft and the Exchange team have been releasing recently. The folks from Redmond have been busier than North Pole elves in December, and we continue to see great things coming down the pipe. But in today’s post, we’re going to take a closer look at a slightly older, but also incredibly powerful tool, called MFCMAPI. In this article, we’ll introduce you to the tool, go over some of its capabilities, and provide you links to resources for further information. If there’s enough interest, we may start a series of how-to’s for using MFCMAPI to troubleshoot a variety of different issues.

MFCMAPI is a free tool available for download from Codeplex at http://mfcmapi.codeplex.com/. It comes in both 32 and 64 bit versions. We indicated that it’s an older tool, but it’s a tool that has been updated regularly since it was released in August 2007, and was updated just last month. MFCMAPI is a GUI tool that can connect to your Exchange mailbox using the same profile and settings as your Outlook client, but rather than acting as a mail client, it functions as a MAPI client. It makes the same connections to Exchange as Outlook does, but shows you what those connections are and allows you to manipulate the objects within your mailbox using MAPI calls, rather than the Outlook interface. This allows you to query, search, delete, and modify objects within your mailbox. Here’s a short list of things you can do with MFCMAPI:

1. Troubleshoot client connections
2. Troubleshoot Free/Busy
3. Delete corrupt email rules
4. Hide or reveal folders
5. Delete delegate permissions from a mailbox
6. Troubleshoot BlackBerry Enterprise Activation
7. Troubleshoot Out Of Office
8. Determine what flags a message as junk (antivirus software or Outlook Junk email filter)
9. Troubleshoot Address Book issues
10. Troubleshoot profile issues
11. Troubleshoot Public Folders
12. Convert between MSG and EML formats

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MFCMAPI

MFCMAPI uses Microsoft's published APIs to provide access to MAPI stores through a graphical user interface. Its purpose is to facilitate investigation of Exchange and Outlook issues and to provide developers with a canonical sample for MAPI development.

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MFCMAPI is a project that I've been following for years now. If you're a hardcode MAPI coder you probably already know about MFCMAPI, but sysadmins/email admins might not. That's what caught my eye in this post, the focus on real world email admins and using it as a real tool...

 

Related Past Post XRef:
November 2011 Update for MFCMAPI and MrMAPI (Think, "MFCMAPI, You're looking kind of Metro" release)
MFCMAPI - Articles-a-pluza!

Microsoft Format and Specification Documentation Refresh ("Significantly changed technical content") [Updated: Includes updates for Office 15 Technical Preview ]

A start in understanding the MS-PST Node Database Layer, your first step toward PST binary enlightenment…
MS-PST file format specification released. Yep, the full and complete specification for Outlook PST’s is now just a download away.
Open source PST SDK/library… from Microsoft!? Yep!