Administration

Exchange Server 2007: Bulk creation of mailboxes using Exchange Management Shell

Bulk creation of mailboxes (and the accompanying user accounts) in Exchange Server 2003/2000 involved some elaborate scripting effort. This task can now be done fairly effortlessly, thanks to the Exchange Management Shell (EMS). The Shell can very easily import/use CSV files saved from a spreadsheet or text editor and create the mailbox-enabled users. Here’s how. […]

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Logging SMTP protocol activity

Like many of my posts, this one also starts with “By default,… “. Like many folks, I’m always curious about the defaults used for almost everything in Exchange/SMTP (and IIS, Windows, AD et al), and at times intrigued by the choices made. One of my pet peeves has been about how installing Exchange changes the […]

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Address Literals and Microsoft Exchange

RFC 2821 specifies how address literals can be used to reach recipients – particularly useful when DNS resolution doesn’t work for a particular domain or host. This is a literal form of the address which can be used as an alternative to the domain name. For IPv4 addresses, the address literal format is localpart@[1.2.3.4] – […]

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Disabling NDRs

RFC 2821 requires a SMTP host to send non-delivery report if a message is accepted but cannot be delivered, and the reverse path is *not null*. Nevertheless, under certain circumstances it may be desirable to disable NDRs (entirely or for a particular domain). In Exchange Server 2007, this can be done from the shell: set-RemoteDomain […]

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Windows Vista and telnet

Fired up the console (command prompt) in Windows Vista and can’t telnet to smtp or use telnet at all for that matter? Just noticed this on Windows Vista RC1 – Telnet is not installed by default… and the HyperTerminal app is history as well. To add Telnet, go to Control Panel -> Programs -> Turn […]

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Exchange Server 2007 exposes SCL in message headers

Exchange Server 2003’s Intelligent Message Filter (IMF) assigns a SCL— a value that indicates the probability of a message being spam – to every message it scans. SCL is assigned based on factors such as message content, headers, and IP addresses. By default, Exchange Server and Microsoft Outlook do not expose this SCL value assigned […]

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IMF: Archiving spam

As explained in previous posts, the Intelligent Message Filter (IMF) offers a few configuration options. The primary interface for configuring IMF is under Global Settings | Message Delivery properties | Intelligent Message Filtering tab. Figure 1: IMF configuration options in Global Settings | Message Delivery | Properties | Intelligent Message Filtering tab Here you specify […]

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HOW TO: Reconnect a mailbox to another user

“How do I reconnect a mailbox to another user?” is a question I’ve come across enough number of times that it makes sense to list the steps here and include a video demo. Scenario: UserA has a mailbox. User leaves the organization. UserB joins. You need to create a new user account for UserB, and […]

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SCRIPT: Get Store GUIDs

Background: Exchange Server 2003 SP2 allows raising the Store size limit. If you’re using Exchange Server 2003 Standard Edition, the default is raised from 16 Gb to 18 Gb, and the maximum size of a Store has been raised to 75 Gb. To raise the Store size limit, you need to insert the Database Size […]

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Five and a half ways to find an email address in Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory

Every once in a while you try to assign a particular address to a recipient in Active Directory Users & Computers, only to be told someone already has that address! Email addresses need to be unique — two recipients can’t have the same email address. Here are a few different ways to find out whether […]

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