I recently needed a script to add new individuals to the
accept message only permissions on a large list of distribution groups. It
needed to be additive so that it was not overwriting the existing permissions. I found several examples and modified them to
suite my needs:
$allowedDL = gc C:\scripts\AllUserLock\allowedDL.txt$People = gc C:\scripts\AllUserLock\People.txt$Groups = gc C:\scripts\AllUserLock\Groups.txtForEach ($Group in $Groups) {Set-DistributionGroup $Group -AcceptMessagesOnlyFrom((Get-DistributionGroup $Group).AcceptMessagesOnlyFrom + $People)Set-DistributionGroup $Group -AcceptMessagesOnlyFromDLMembers((Get-DistributionGroup $Group).AcceptMessagesOnlyFromDLMembers + $alloweddl)}
This worked great until I realized I’d missed adding a
couple groups due to interruptions as I was working on this task. When I added
the new groups to the allowedDL.txt file and ran the script again I got this
error - Cannot convert value
Microsoft.Exchange.Data.MultiValuedProperty. I knew the syntax was correct. The values that could not be converted were
clearly the new distribution lists in the allowedDL.txt file. My web searches
found several references to this error but no solutions or explanations. In
fact I recognized it from an issue I have had previously importing trusted
domains into Office 365 EOP. A call to
Microsoft support services was no help on that.
What I eventually found was that when I added the 2 new
DL’s to allowedDL.txt I had added several trailing carriage returns. What
happens is the scripts builds a text string and added it to the existing
permissions. It looks like “DL1,DL2,DL3DL4”. Those carriage returns cause the string to
look like “DL1,DL2,DL3DL4
” You cannot add white space to a multi-property string as that white space has value.White space is not interpreted a null value.
Removing the trailing carriage returns in the input file
fixed the issue….. now I need to return to working on importing my trusted
senders :
