A dear friend of mine recently needed to recover all email from his mailbox. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, there are plenty of options in any sane mail application – export or archive mailbox, select-all messages and “Send Again”\/Redirect\/Bounce to another address or at the very worst, select-all and forward. Most of these options are available with desktop mail applications – Pine, Squirrelmail, IMP, Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Mail.app, Thunderbird, Eudora and I’m sure loads of others.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately the only access provided was through Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access (2007). This, whilst being fairly pretty in Lite (non-Internet Explorer browsers) mode and prettier\/heavier in MSIE, does not have any useful bulk forwarding or export functionality at all<\/strong>. None. Not desperately handy, to be sure.<\/p>\n Ok, so my first port of call was to connect my Mail.app which supports Exchange OWA access. No dice – spinning, hanging, no data. Hmm – odd. Ok, second I tried fetchExc<\/a> a Java commandline tool which promised everything I needed but in the end delivered pretty obtuse error messages. After an hour’s fiddling I gave up with fetchExc and tried falling back to Perl with Email::Folder::Exchange<\/a>. This had very similar results to fetchExc but a slightly different set of errors.<\/p>\n After much swearing and a lot more poking, probing and requesting of tips from other friends (thanks Ze) the OWA service was also found to be sitting behind Microsoft’s Internet Security and Acceleration server<\/a>. This isn’t a product I’ve used before but I can only assume it’s an expensive reverse proxy, the sort of thing I’d compare to inexpensive Apache + mod_proxy + mod_security on a good day. This ISA service happened to block all remote SOAP (2000\/2003) and WebDAV (2007\/2010) access too. Great! No remote service access whatsoever.<\/p>\n Brute force to the rescue. I could, of course go in and manually forward each and every last mail, but that’s quite tedious and a huge amount of clicking and pasting in the same email address.\u00c2\u00a0Enter Selenium IDE<\/a>.<\/p>\n Selenium<\/a> is a suite of tools for remote controlling browsers, primarily for writing tests for interactive applications. I use it in my day to day work mostly for checking bits of dynamic javascript, DHTML, forms etc. are doing the right things when clicked\/pressed\/dragged and generally interacted with. OWA is just a (really<\/strong> badly written) webpage to interact with, after all.<\/p>\n I downloaded the excellent sideflow.js<\/a> plugin which provides loop functionality not usually required for web app testing and after a bit of DOM inspection on the OWA pages I came up with the following plan –<\/p>\n The macro looked something like this:<\/p>\n So I logged in, opened each folder in turn and replayed the macro in Selenium IDE<\/a> as many times as I needed to. Bingo! Super kludgy but it worked well, was entertaining to watch and ultimately did the job.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A dear friend of mine recently needed to recover all email from his mailbox. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, there are plenty of options in any sane mail application – export or archive mailbox, select-all messages and “Send Again”\/Redirect\/Bounce to another address or at the very worst, select-all and forward. Most of these options … Continue reading “Another use for Selenium IDE”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,9],"tags":[822,178,821,820,823,819],"class_list":["post-634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming","category-webdev","tag-exchange","tag-macro","tag-outlook","tag-owa","tag-scripting","tag-selenium"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n
<table cellpadding=\"1\" cellspacing=\"1\" border=\"1\">\r\n<thead>\r\n<tr><td rowspan=\"1\" colspan=\"3\">owa-selenium-macro<\/td><\/tr>\r\n<\/thead><tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n\t<td>getEval<\/td>\r\n\t<td>index=0<\/td>\r\n\t<td><\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n\t<td>while<\/td>\r\n\t<td>index<500<\/td>\r\n\t<td><\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n\t<td>storeEval<\/td>\r\n\t<td>index<\/td>\r\n\t<td>value<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n\t<td>echo<\/td>\r\n\t<td>${value}<\/td>\r\n\t<td><\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n\t<td>clickAndWait<\/td>\r\n\t<td>\/\/table[1]\/tbody\/tr[2]\/td[3]\/table\/tbody\/tr[2]\/td\/div\/table\/\/tbody\/tr[3]\/td[6]\/h1\/a<\/td>\r\n\t<td><\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n\t<td>clickAndWait<\/td>\r\n\t<td>id=lnkHdrforward<\/td>\r\n\t<td><\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n\t<td>type<\/td>\r\n\t<td>id=txtto<\/td>\r\n\t<td>newaddress@gmail.com<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n\t<td>clickAndWait<\/td>\r\n\t<td>id=lnkHdrsend<\/td>\r\n\t<td><\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n\t<td>click<\/td>\r\n\t<td>name=chkmsg<\/td>\r\n\t<td><\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n\t<td>clickAndWait<\/td>\r\n\t<td>id=lnkHdrdelete<\/td>\r\n\t<td><\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n\t<td>getEval<\/td>\r\n\t<td>index++<\/td>\r\n\t<td><\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n\t<td>endWhile<\/td>\r\n\t<td><\/td>\r\n\t<td><\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<\/tbody><\/table>\r\n<\/code><\/pre>\n