OWA Toolbar

For use with SPAMfighter Exchange Module a cusom toolbar for Microsoft Exchange OWA 2003 – 2016 was required. The purpose of this toolbar is to assist normal users to block or unblock e-mails.

Microsoft Exchange OWA is the mail server’s web based interface for mailboxes (i.e. webmail) and is a proprietary solution without any public API’s that could fulfill the requirements for the custom toolbar.

Because of the lack of a public API, and the fact that each Exchange version, and update to said versions, combined with differences introduced by Windows operating system changed how the system worked – development of the toolbar had a number of challenges. The solution was to reverse enginer the inner workings of the Exchange OWA applications and develop a generalized system for the toolbar that could accomplish the following tasks:

• Inject a toolbar into an existing Exchange OWA application
• Intercept calls to internal functions in an Exchange OWA application
• On-the-fly modification of communication protocol used by an Exchange OWA application
• Handle differences introduced by various operating systems and web servers

The solution was highly innovative and combined a number of technologies and methods – such as ISAPI, COM+, ASP.NET, Http handlers, JSON, JavaScript and SOAP.