Use the –Filter, Luke

Quite often, I see questions like “Why is my Get-Recipient command so slow?”, with a syntax like:

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$user1 = Get-Recipient -ResultSize unlimited ` |Where-Object {$_.emailaddresses -eq ` ‘karlmitschke@contoso.com’}

You would think that would work lickity split, because there is only 1 result, me.

Ah, not so fast, grasshopper.  We are doing client side filtering – all recipients are returned by the Get-Recipient call, and THEN we pass those objects to the Where-Object.

On my Exchange 2007 system, this takes over a minute to return my information in $user1

So, I did some research, and read about –Filters and doing server side filtering:

http://blogs.technet.com/evand/archive/2007/02/19/filterable-properties-in-exchange-2007-rtm.aspx and http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb738155.aspx

Modifying my script to use the –Filter produces results in less than 1 second:

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$user2 = Get-Recipient -Filter ` {EmailAddresses -eq ‘karlmitschke@contoso.com’}

I suggest that you check for the –Filter parameter for any cmdlet that you use, and learn its syntax!

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