2022-01-03

It was quite a wild ride through most of 2022. I'm happy to have that year over and done with, for all the good and the bad that it held. This year is promising to hold its own adventures and its own new horizons. I know for a fact I've got changes in family and career coming up even within the first 6 months, and God only knows what else hides behind the fog of war later on in 2023.

Thoughts on Microsoft enterprise email / cloud tenant stuff

The kind of programmatical power you have over Microsoft Exchange stuff in the cloud nowadays is both impressive and horrifying in equal measure.

You could, for example, view all of your email inboxes as filing cabinets. And using the wonders of Powershell and .NET, you can create an army of metaphorical Roomba vacuums that will zip and zoom around every single file cabinet and grab whatever data you need out of whatever inboxes it's stored in. You can go through email conversations between different people, see emails that a single user's participated in, or find out who all got that spam email the filter hadn't caught on a given day.

But on the other hand, just like most live CLI session tools that Microsoft enjoys making and forcing us to use... you can screw things up in real time. There's not a lot of recourse if you don't know what you're doing ahead of time and foolishly run big, destructive commands. RTFM is a big deal when it comes to handling a lot of these 365 assets, because the alternative is letting you, a monkey, loose with the typewriter of your company's infrastructure and cloud investments.

Or, in other words, there's not a lot of nuance between telling your army of programmatical Roombas: "Hey, please pull this email because Cybersecurity views it as a threat"; and instead, with a wrong command, telling them: "Hey, Roombas, take a shotgun and blast through every single filing cabinet that has this very common subject line on it, destroying it (mostly) irrevocably."

That's both hilarious and terrifying to me, that so much of our information services, if not properly configured and permissioned, can be damaged or destroyed by such simple means.

Kinda makes me want to just buy a cabin somewhere and whittle soap instead, depending on the day.

Contact me

If you want to contact me, email is best

wholesomedonut(at)ctrl-c(d0t)club .