How to avoid Exchange Named Property exhaustion?

Question

Based on the Microsoft blog post below, I started using Named Properties to tag outgoing emails with a Key,Value pair when using EWS. This approach is used to find back the email that was just sent on the server so you can get the identifier of the mail needed for post processing (like moving the email).

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/exchangedev/2010/02/25/determining-the-id-of-a-sent-message-by-using-extended-properties-with-the-ews-managed-api/

What the article didn't say is that there is a hard limit on the number of named properties you can create in the database (property name and guid pairs).

• https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb851495(v=exchg.80).aspx
• https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2010/07/29/confused-about-named-properties-quotas-in-exchange-2003-and-exchange-2007-join-the-club/

I used properties to solve the exact problem the blog post was solving. Why wouldn't they mention a limitation like this? I feel I missed something that should have been obvious.

Questions:

1. Is there a way to use these properties so that they don't get exhausted? Some technique the blog post doesn't describe?

2. Is there an alternative approach I can use to solve the same problem?

Answer 1

The way to avoid named property exhaustion is don't use a new property every time. Eg for your application you would only need one name property because your point of difference should be the property value(eg if you searching later these properties won't be indexed anyway so having a separate property for each message isn't going to give you any better performance). Even if you need to have a different key value pairs you still could put that into the property value (eg use a JSON string which is what Microsoft do for Mail Apps so you can then essential have one extended property with multiple KeyValue pair although search performance will suffer for this because SubString queries are expensive).