Updated script that applies retention tag to items in a default folder

Articles in the "Retention tag on default folder items" series

  1. Use EWS to apply retention policy to items in a default folder
  2. Script to set retention tag on default folder items updated to v1.1.1
  3. Default folder retention tag script updated to 1.3
  4. Updated script that applies retention tag to items in a default folder [This article]

Edit 12/1/17: The issue with the retention tag GUID not being set by Exchange Online has been resolved.  Therefore, I have removed the code that distinguishes between online and on-premises so that the GUID is always applied.

My script that adds a personal tag to items in a default folder stopped working correctly recently.  Even though it was applying a tag to matching items, the collection size was never getting smaller.  After investigating, I found that a change has been made in Exchange Online.  The property that holds the GUID of the applied tag is no longer used by Exchange Online.  This is also the property I am using to search for items to tag.  You can tell Exchange to set a value for the property, and it will respond without error, but it doesn’t actually update the property.  So my script kept getting items that had already been updated.  I suspect this has something to do with added support for labels from the Security and Compliance Center.

I have updated the script to instead filter items that do not have a retention period set.  To accommodate this distinction from how Exchange on-premises still operates, I have added the Environment parameter, which defaults to Exchange Online, so that the GUID will still be applied when run against an on-premises mailbox.  The code that handles changed result sets (where the number of items in the results changes while in the middle of processing) had a display issue where it would double the number of items processed (it didn’t affect the items, but was only a display issue); I have changed the processing loop to now retrieve all items first, then process them in one batch, rather than retrieving and processing them in 50-item batches.

  Set-DefaultFolderItemsTag.ps1 (9.4 KiB)

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