How to Update Shared Mailbox Owners About Quota Usage

Shared Mailbox Quota Report a Take on an Old Script

In September 2019, I wrote about using PowerShell to generate an Exchange Online mailbox quota report. The idea was to allow administrators to identify mailboxes that surpassed a certain quota threshold (say 85%) so that they could proactively manage the situation and prevent users from exceeding quota. It’s never good for someone to be unable to send and receive email because of a blown quota.

The 2019 article came to mind when I was asked about writing a script to report quota usage for shared mailboxes. These mailboxes don’t have formal owners, but the idea was to regard anyone with full access to the mailbox as an owner. The purpose of the script is to capture details of quota usage and email that information to the mailbox owners.

Stitching Bits Together to Create a New Script

One of the nice things about PowerShell is that it’s easy to reuse code from scripts to form a new solution. In this case, I used the following:

• Code to calculate the percentage of quota used for a mailbox. The figures returned by the Get-ExoMailboxStatistics cmdlet need some manipulation to make them easier to work with.
• Create and send email using the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. I decided to use the Send-MgUserMail cmdlet to send the notification message, and this cmdlet is best for simple messages.
• How to authenticate with the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK using a registered app and certificate thumbprint. If you use an interactive session to connect to the Graph, you can only send email from the mailbox belonging to the signed-in account (delegate permission). To use another account, you must authenticate via an app that has consent to use the Mail.Send.All permission. Using certificate-based authentication is more secure than account passwords. In a production environment, I’d use Azure Automation to run the job on a scheduled basis and use a managed identity for authentication.

Reusing code saves time, which is one of the prime benefits cited for GitHub Copilot. Why write code from scratch when you can find it on the internet (always test this code first) or on your workstation?

Script Code Flow to Create and Email Shared Mailbox Quota Reports

The major steps in the script are:

• Define settings such as the account used to send email, the account that will serve as the default recipient if no accounts with full access are found for a mailbox, app and tenant identifiers, and the certificate thumbprint to use for authentication.
• Sign into Exchange Online to use cmdlets like Get-ExoMailboxStatistics.
• Sign into the Graph using an app and certificate.
• Find the set of shared mailboxes with Get-ExoMailbox.
• For each mailbox, find the set of accounts with full access rights. This set might include security groups, so some processing is needed to identify groups and extract their membership.
• Check if mailboxes are assigned a product license containing the Exchange Online Plan 2 service plan. If so, their quota is higher (100 GB) than the default (50 GB). Some unlicensed mailboxes have the higher quota, but that’s only because Microsoft hasn’t reduced those quotas (yet).
• Fetch the current mailbox statistics.
• Compute the percentage of quota used.
• Write data about each shared mailbox into a list.

After processing the shared mailboxes, a second step loops through the list to create and send messages to the mailbox owners to tell them how much quota is used. Figure 1 shows an example of a quota message generated by the script.

The message is sparse and lots of possibilities exist for including other information in it, such as pointers to tell recipients what to do if the percentage quota used is more than a certain threshold. You’re only limited by your imagination!

You can download the full script from GitHub.

PowerShell Fills the Gaps

This is yet another example of how to use PowerShell to fill in the gaps in Microsoft 365 tenant administration. Some people might not care too much about shared mailbox quotas, other will be very concerned. PowerShell gives you the ability to code your own solution if you think it’s necessary.

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