Reading mail from an exchange mailbox, no Outlook

girarde has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a job that sends email to an organizational box. I have a script that runs as a user that has Full Control of that org box's associated account in an Active Directory 2003 domain.

The script runs on a Windows 2003 server that does not, and will not, have Outlook installed.

Authen::NTLM does not seem to be willing to use the current user's credentials. Any ideas for how to read this mail into the script without installing a client?

UPDATE:

I am also using Email::Folder::Exchange, which is what is complaining about not having credentials available. Snippet below:

#!/c/perl/bin/perl

use strict;

use warnings;

use Email::Folder::Exchange;

use Authen::NTLM;

my $user = ntlm_user();

my $password = ntlm_password();

my $folder = Email::Folder::Exchange->new('https://fqdn.com/Exchange/o
+rgbox/Inbox', $user, $password);

my $pile;

for my $message ($folder->messages) {
    if ($message->header('Subject') =~  /Addition to EPAS Training Sit
+e for 18 FLTS/) {
        $pile .= $message->body;
        last;
    }
}

print $pile;

exit;
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Re: Reading mail from an exchange mailbox, no Outlook by tokpela (Chaplain) on Sep 24, 2010 at 01:26 UTC
Reading the documentation for Email::Folder::Exchange, it looks like this module works through the Outlook Web Access. If you do not have Outlook Web Access enabled and want to access an Exchange Server without Outlook, you will have to use CDO (Collaboration Data Objects) which provide a COM based API to connect to a MAPI store. I connected to Exchange through Perl using Outlook Redemption which allowed for better script integration. As for getting the current user and password information, I am not sure how this would not be a major security hole! I have not tried the Win32::IntAuth but maybe this would allow you to impersonate your Exchange user and connect via CDO/RDO as mentioned above.	[reply]
Re^2: Reading mail from an exchange mailbox, no Outlook by girarde (Hermit) on Sep 24, 2010 at 19:49 UTC
I do have an OWA server available, it's merely that Outlook will not be installed on the server that script will be running on. I'll check CDO and the other modules.	[reply]
Re^3: Reading mail from an exchange mailbox, no Outlook by roboticus (Chancellor) on Sep 24, 2010 at 23:42 UTC
girarde: You don't need Outlook to access the OWA server. You can do just fine with normal web access (e.g. LWP). I had a similar problem a few years back, and that's how we got around it. (Note:* "We" as in "Someone else on my team did the work".)* ...roboticus	[reply]
Re: Reading mail from an exchange mailbox, no Outlook by bellaire (Hermit) on Sep 24, 2010 at 00:55 UTC
Looking at the source to Authen::NTLM, there is nothing in there that will grab the username and password for the currently logged in user. In fact, I'd venture to say that it's not possible to obtain the cleartext password for the current user. All the `ntlm_password()` sub does is to return a password you set earlier by using, for example, the `new` contructor for `Authen::NTLM`. Unfortunately, if you don't have a way of actually obtaining the username and password (e.g. from a configuration file) to use in this script, I don't think this approach is going to work for you. And, while I'm no expert with Win32 in Perl, I don't know of any approach that will, short of installing Outlook.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Reading mail from an exchange mailbox, no Outlook by afoken (Chancellor) on Sep 24, 2010 at 04:12 UTC
Try the internet standard protocols, i.e. SMTP to send (TCP port 25 or 587), POP3 (TCP port 110) or IMAP4 (TCP port 143) to receive. Those protocols are often enabled on Exchange servers, if not, talk to the server's administrator. As soon as you know that those protocols work, forget that you are "talking" with an Exchange server and work like you would do with any other internet mail server. Alexander -- Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)	[reply]
Re^2: Reading mail from an exchange mailbox, no Outlook by girarde (Hermit) on Sep 24, 2010 at 19:54 UTC
POP3 and IMAP4 are not enabled on the mail server, and they WILL NOT be enabled there. This decision was made at echelons above reality.	[reply]