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How To

How to give send as permission in Office 365 Using Powershell

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Granting “Send As” permissions on Office 365 permits a user to send mail from using an email address assigned to another user or other mail enabled object, such as a distribution group.

Use the Add-MailboxPermission cmdlet to give “Send As” permissions to a user. For example:

Add-RecipientPermission "Sales Group" -AccessRights SendAs -Trustee "Paulie"

Powershell to grant send-as permissions

Fill the form below and the required Powershell will be generated for you.

  • Fill the “Identity” field to with the target object that you want to to send as.
    Can be any value that uniquely identifies the object such as Alias, email address etc.
  • The “Trustee” is the user or group to whom you want to grant access
  • Copy the automatically generated code into a Powershell window and the change will be made.

If successful, your PowerShell should look something like this:

Image showing Powershell Window adding send as permissions on an Office 365 account
Successfully added send-as permission.

Hope this helps 🙂

Send as alias in Office 365 using Outlook 2016

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Although it is possible to assign many email aliases to a single account in Office 365 it is not easy to send as an alias using Outlook when composing a new email.

There are two workarounds to this, the first is to use a distribution group and assign users permissions to send from that distribution group. The second, which is the method documented in this post is to set-up a second mail account within Outlook and use the account to send mail via the Office 365 SMTP servers.  This will give you the ability to select the alias using the “From” button when composing a new email.

How to setup Outlook to send from an alias in Office 365

The idea behind this method is to setup a second account in Outlook that will allow sending from an alias that has been defined in Office 365. It would be better if the ability to send as an alias was native to Outlook/Office 365, but it isn’t. See these instructions for how to add an alias with Powershell.

Before you can proceed, you need to find your SMTP settings:  To do this, login to Outlook Web App, click on the little cog in the top right of the screen to bring up the options menu and click on options.

  • Login to Outlook Web App
  • Click the settings cog in the top right corner
  • In the search box at the top of the settings window, type in “pop”:
    Imaging showing how to access pop and SMTP settings in Office 365 Outlook Web App
  • Click on POP and IMAP
  • This will show you the settings you need for POP, IMAP and SMTP access. We only need the SMTP setting:
    Image showing SMTP Server settings for Office 365 to allow you to send from an alias using Microsoft Outlook

I expect your settings will be the same as mine, which means your Office 365 SMTP Server will be smtp.office365.com.  Before proceeding ensure you have added the alias that you want to send from to your Office 365 account.

Setup Outlook 2016 to send from an email alias

    1. Go to “File” and then “Account Settings”.  Click the “Account settings” button and choose “Account Settings”:
      Image showing how to create a new account in Outlook 2016 to send email from alias
    2. This will bring up the list of your accounts, click new:
      Image showing new account creation to enable sending from an alias in Office 365
    3. Recent versions of Outlook 2016 may show a “Simplified Account Creation Screen”, which makes this process much more difficult:
      Image showing Outlook account setup wizard and selecting the setup account manually checkbox.
    4. If you see the above screen, follow these instructions to disable simple account creation
    5. On the account Setup screen, select “Manual setup or additional server types”
      Image showing Outlook 2016 Account Setup Wizard to allow sending from an email alias in Office 365
    6. On the next screen choose “POP or IMAP” and then press “Next”.
      Correct Settings for sending email via an alias in Office 365

      • “Your name” is the display name that will be presented to the recipient.
      • “Email address” is the email alias that you added to your account in Office 365.
      • Account Type should be POP3.
      • Incoming Mail Server “127.0.0.1”.
      • Outgoing mail server(SMTP) should be set to whatever your SMTP server was shown as in Outlook Web App, but probably smtp.office365.com
      • Username should be your actual Office 365 username, not an email alias.
      • Password should be set to your Office 365 Password.
      • Untick the option “Automatically test account settings when Next is clicked”
    7. Now click on “More Settings …”
    8. Click on the “Outgoing Server” Tab and then tick the box “My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication”.
      Outlook 2013 SMTP Authentication for Office 365
    9. Click on the “Advanced” tab and then change the “Outgoing Server (SMTP)” setting to 587 and the encryption type to “TLS”.
      Outlook SMTP TLS Settings for Office 365
    10. Click OK to return to the previous screen and then click next to add the account.  On the next screen click finish.
    11. When the account was created Outlook created a new PST file for the new account.  We don’t need that as we are not going to be receiving any emails on this account.  You should now be back at the E-Mail accounts screen.  Click on your new account to highlight it and then click on “Change Folder” option.
    12. Select your inbox from your main Exchange account.  Click OK and then Close.  The new PST file will still be in your folder list, but you can remove it by right clicking on it and choosing close.
    13. Now your account is set-up and you will be able to send email from this address by simply selecting the from address when composing a new email.
      Selecting an alternate from address in Outlook 2016 using an Office 365 email alias
    14. Although you are now in a position to send emails using this address there is one additional step to ensure that Outlook does not attempt to receive email.Click on the “Send / Receive” tab and then click on “Define Send/Receive groups”In the Send/Receive Groups settings, click on “Edit”.  Select your newly created account and untick the box which says “Include the selected account in this group”.  Like the following picture:
      Removing an account from the send/receive group in Outlook 2016

If you found this post helpful, I’d really appreciate it if you rated it.

HP Direct PDF Printing and Printer tray control

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HP Direct PDF printing is a great cross platform driverless printing mechanism which I have used for a number of customers with great results.

A common problem with Direct PDF printing is that it is not possible to include any printer control commands such as tray calls within the PDF and lots of people have been asking how to do this – I checked with HP Technical support and was told it is not possible.

It is possible however to setup a print job with PJL commands and include the PDF documents within that job. The key being to set the printer language/personality to PDF and then using the UEL (Universal Exit Language) command to issue more control commands. After a bit of trial and error I found that this is actually quite straightforward, and thought I would post the code as I was not able to find any working examples:


ESC%[email protected]
@PJL JOB NAME = "paultest2.pdf" DISPLAY = "Printing & Stapling paultest2.pdf"
@PJL SET OUTBIN=OPTIONALOUTBIN1
@PJL SET PROCESSINGTYPE="STAPLING"
@PJL SET PROCESSINGOPTION="LEFT_1PT_ANGLED"
@PJL SET MEDIASOURCE = TRAY3
@PJL ENTER LANGUAGE = PDF

After setting up the job with the above, you can then add the PDF code. After the PDF you either need to end the job or specify more further printing control. In my example I am printing another PDF document right away within the same job but from a different tray, like so:


ESC%[email protected]
@PJL SET MEDIASOURCE = TRAY4
@PJL ENTER LANGUAGE = PDF

Then follow this with more PDF data and then end the job like this:


ESC%[email protected]
@PJL RESET
@PJL EOJ NAME = "paultest2.pdf"
ESC%-12345X

In this example the two PDFs are also being stapled together and the status display on the printer is also updated to show what document is being printed.

All of the above was tested using a HP Laserjet P4015N with a 500-Sheet Stapler/Stacker(CB522A). Although it contains no references to PDF printing, the best reference I have found is this document from HP:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/bpl13208/bpl13208.pdf

In production I am doing all of the PJL wrapping via a korn shell script which I’ve tested from IBM AIX, Ubuntu and Sco Openserver 5.0.7.

Script to generate email alerts from Dell Openmanage (OMSA)

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Dell Openmanage Server Administrator is a really useful tool for configuring and monitoring server hardware but it lacks built in E-Mail alerts.

It is capable of executing  scripts when a server alert is triggered so I have written a simple script in VBScript that provides the missing E-Mail alert functionality.

Updated version of this script

Many people land on this page, while the script and instructions on this page still work, there is an updated post with new information, please see this post:

https://tachytelic.net/2011/09/dell-poweredge-email-alerts/

How to configure email alerts from Dell Open Manage

  1. Download the script
  2. Extract the contents of the zip file to a folder on your machine
  3. Edit the top of the script to make the SMTP settings appropriate for your environment:

    Image showing how to reconfigure Dell Alert VBScript
    If a remote SMTP server is not specified the script will try to use the local machine to send the E-Mail.
  4. Test the email functionality by running:
    cscript dellalert.vbs testemail
  5. Setup the alerts by running:
    cscript dellalert.vbs setup
  6. Once this is done you should be able to see that the script has been added into OMSA:

Now you need to generate some real alerts to test the script properly. How you do this will depend on the capabilities of your server, I was able to disconnect the redundant power supply and have an alert generated almost immediately. Opening the case will also generate an event on some servers. Hopefully you should get something like this in your Inbox:

Let me know how you get on and leave any questions in the comments area.

Recovering saved FTP Passwords using a simple netmon filter

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Today I needed to FTP some files to a site that I have used on and off for a number of years. Because I have recently installed Windows 7 I needed to setup the site again in my FTP Client, Core FTP.

Although my old machine still has the connection setup I was not able to see the cached/saved password. Although it is possible to export the sites, the password remained encrypted and I wanted to document the actual password.

There are a lot of tools, some free and some which you have to pay for which will recover the cached FTP password for you. Some of these looked a bit questionable and as FTP is an entirely unencrypted service I thought it should be easy to sniff the password out of the FTP traffic itself.

Turns out that it really is very easy and the saved password can be retreived instantly using netmon.

So here is how to do it.

Create a new capture filter in netmon and enter the following:

tcp.Port==21 and property.TCPPayload.contains("PASS")

Should look like this:

Netmon FTP Password Capture

Then click on the start button to begin capture. Then open your FTP client which contains the cached password and connect to the FTP server.

As soon as you have made a succesful connection switch back to netmon and stop the capture. You should then be able to see the FTP password in clear text in the capture window, something like this:

I spotted a lot of posts from people trying to recover or export their saved FTP passwords from CoreFTP and CuteFTP and many programs are designed specifically for this purpose. This is quick and simple and does not depend on any 3rd party software and should work with any FTP client.

Hope this helps someone.