HOW TO: Find an email address in Active Directory

Every once in a while you try to assign a particular address to a recipient in AD Users & Computers, only to be told someone already has that address! Email addresses need to be unique - two recipients cannot have the same email address.

Here are a few different ways to find out whether an email address is assigned, and the recipient it belongs to.

Resolve Recipient: Create a new message in Microsoft Outlook, enter the email address. Press CTRL-K. If the recipient is not hidden from Address Lists/GAL, the email address resolves to the Display Name.

Request Delivery Receipt: If the recipient is hidden from Address Lists, send a message to it with a Delivery Receipt requested.

ADUC Saved Query: In AD Users & Computers (on Windows Server 2003), right-click Saved Queries container | New | Query.
- Enter a name for the query, and click the Define Query button
- From the Find drop-down - select Custom Search | go to Advanced tab
- In the Enter LDAP Query text box, enter the query:

(proxyAddresses=smtp:postmaster@exchangepedia.com)

This returns recipients of all types - users, mail-enabled contacts, public folders, and groups that have the address postmaster@exchangepedia.com.

Click here to see a Flash demo. [Link updated]




 Using CSVDE/LDIFDE to find an email address: Saved Queries isn't available in the Windows 2000 version of ADUC. You can also use CSVDE or LDIFDE to export this information to a file, using the following command:

csvde -f outputfilename.csv -d "dc=domain,dc=com" -r "(&(mailnickname=*)(proxyAddresses=smtp:foo@domain.com))" -l name

Replace "dc=domain,dc=com" with your AD domain name and suffix, and foo@domain.com with the exact email address you're looking for.

To find all recipients who have an email address from a particular SMTP domain, you can use a wildcard, e.g.:

csvde -f outputfilename.csv -d "dc=domain,dc=com" -r "(&(mailnickname=*)(proxyAddresses=smtp:*@domain.com))" -l name

In the above example, only the name field is exported. All CSVDE/LDIFDE queries also return the object's distinguishedName. To add more fields to the list, insert a coma after name and type new field names separated by a coma: e.g.

name,displayName,sAMAccountName,proxyAddresses,homeMDB

 Finding email addresses using the Exchange shell (Exchange Server 2007): The Exchange Server 2007 shell makes it easier (once you familiarize yourself with shell basics). To get a list of all recipients with email addresses from a particular domain:

get-recipient | where {$_.emailaddresses -match "domain.com"} | select name,emailaddresses

To get a list of recipients with a particular email address:

get-recipient | where {$_.emailaddresses -match "foo@domain.com"} | select name,emailaddresses

Related Post(s):
1. Update - HOW TO: Find an email address in Active Directory
12/3/2007 - Content from the UPDATE post has been merged with this post to make it convenient for readers.
2. HOW TO: Export all email addresses from a domain