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Microsoft Idea

Power BI

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Add parameters to Exchange.Contents in Power Query to limit returned data

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James Lees's profile image

James Lees on 18 May 2021 11:05:09

As far as I can tell, Exchange.Contents fetches the mailbox contents including email bodies and attachments.

This makes calling Exchange.Contents on a large mailbox extremely slow and in danger of hitting service timeouts.

I envisage that most use cases, as with mine, need only the envelope, status and informational data, i.e. everything except mail bodies and attachments (although still need to know "has attachment").

My suggestion is to add a second parameter to the Exchange.Contents call, maybe a record of options, to include the option to suppress bodies and attachments. This should enable the call to work much faster on large mailboxes, and presumably also substantially reduce workload on the Exchange server, workload on the Power BI service, and traffic between the two. Sounds like win-win for Microsoft and the customer.