Exchange

Calendar delegation allows a user to manage someone else’s calendar on their behalf. For example, an assistant could be granted delegator rights to their manager’s calendar. Through delegation, the assistant has the right to add, edit, or delete items from their manager’s calendar. A delegate can also be granted the ability to view items marked as private. Aside from calendar permissions, the delegate can receive meeting invites on behalf of the delegator and respond to those invites (accept, decline, tentative, propose new time).

When an assistant no longer needs to access their manager’s calendar, they can be removed as a delegate. Either the manager can do this via the Outlook client or an Exchange administrator by using PowerShell. When their delegation rights have been removed, all access to the calendar is revoked. In addition, meeting invites are no longer sent to the delegate to accept or decline.

It is possible that even when the delegate permissions have been revoked, the assistant could still unexpectantly receive items sent to their manager. In this article, we look at a couple of possible areas that could be forwarding these items to the former delegate.

Let’s get started!

Verify the user is no longer a delegate

The first item to confirm is whether the delegate rights have been properly removed. To do this, connect to Exchange PowerShell and run the following command.

 C:\> Get-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity river.song@xyz.com:\Calendar

FolderName            User                  AccessRights
----------            ----                  ------------
Calendar              Default               {AvailabilityOnly}
Calendar              Rory Williams         {Editor}

In the example above, we are checking the calendar permissions for the user River Song. We use the Get-MailboxFolderPermission command for this purpose. The Identity parameter is a combination of the delegator’s email address and the folder in question. In this case, the calendar folder. You can also use this command against any other folder in the mailbox. In our example, we want to see if River Song’s former assistant, Amy Pond, still has any rights to River’s calendar.

The example output returns two entries. The first is for a user named Rory Williams. We see Rory Williams has editor rights to River’s calendar. We also see a user named Default. Default is the default permission users receive if they have not been granted explicit permissions. In the example above, Rory Williams would receive editor rights to River’s calendar, whereas all other users will only see River’s free/busy information (availability only). Amy Pond is not identified in this output, so she should only receive free/busy information. In this example, Amy is not a delegate.

If the output had returned Amy Pond as a user, we could remove those rights using the Remove-MailboxFolderPermission. For example, to remove all of Amy’s permissions from River’s calendar folder, we would issue the following command.

 C:\> Remove-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity river.song@xyz.com:\Calendar 
-User amy.pond@xyz.com