Office 365 Reciepient Policies

One of the requirements for moving to Office 365 hosted mailboxes is that all recipients MUST have “automatically update e-mail addresses based on email address policy” enabled. This often is disabled when changing account names due to marriage, etc. When changing the primary SMTP address on an Exchange mail enabled object the best practice is to change the alias and let the policy create the email address so that you don’t have to uncheck/check this property.

It’s pretty easy to find all of these objects via PowerShell.

get-recipient -ResultSize Unlimited -IgnoreDefaultScope -ReadFromDomainController | where-object{($_.EmailAddressPolicyEnabled -like "false")}  |select name, identity, RecipientType, EmailAddressPolicyEnabled | export-csv c:\msExchPoliciesExcluded.txt

You can change the get-recipient applet to get-mailbox or get-MailPublicFolder if you want to focus on them individually.  Exporting them to CSV allows you to take a quick look to make sure that the alias matches the email address so you’re not accidently changing someone’s primary SMTP address.

If everything looks good you can bulk enable the recipient policy with this one-liner:

get-mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited -IgnoreDefaultScope -ReadFromDomainController | where-object{($_.EmailAddressPolicyEnabled -like "false")}  |Set-Mailbox -EmailAddressPolicyEnabled $true

IMAP transport logging

So if you’re building custom applications to connect with IMAP you may need to turn on logging for the IMAP transport layer.  Don’t confuse this with turning up logging on the IMAP4 Service to Expert.  That will just give you increased application logging.  I’m talking about monitoring transport and connection attempts.

To enable the logging for IMAP, you would do this:

1. Browse to C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\ClientAccess\PopImap
2. Open Microsoft.Exchange.Imap4.exe.config with text editor (e.g. Notepad) and scroll to the bottom
3. Modify ProtocolLog from false to true.
4. Modify LogPath as necessary
5. Restart the MsExchangeImap4 service

Another setting that you may find interesting is AgeQuotaInHours.  This prevents you from filling the log drive with old log files. The default is 24 hours so you’ll need to change this if you are having intermittent or ongoing issues.

You can do the same thing for POP, simply edit Microsoft.Exchange.Pop3.exe.config instead and restart the MsExcahngePop3 service.

Exchange 2007 – Where Nothing Happens Fast

One thing that I really like about exchange 2007 is The Exchange Management Shell (and Powershell). I try to use it for most of my daily tasks but sometimes it’s just quicker to right-click and pick new.

... until you make a mistake. I meant to create a mailbox database but I created a public folder database.  No big deal right? just delete it. There’s no data on it? Not so fast. Here’s what I get:

Remove-PublicFolderDatabase : Exchange is unable to check the public folder rep

licas. Verify the Microsoft Information Store service is running, and that the da

tabase is properly mounted

OK. FINE I’ll mount the database. GRRRR now I get this:

The public folder database contains folder replicas. Before deleting the public

folder database, remove the folders or move the replicas to another public

folder database. For detailed instructions about how to remove a public folder

database, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=81409.

I’m going to rant a little here. I’m wrapping up my 2003 to 2007 migration this month. I really liked that Exchange 2003 had pretty much done away with the little idiosyncrasies we’d come to love/hate about earlier versions. Gone were the days of “Exchange is just that way.” Well I’m starting to see that those days are back.  2007 puts a copy of the public folder hierarchy on all public folder databases.  This is a good thing. But what this means for me right now is that I have to wait for this database to replicate to all of my other public folder servers around the world. I also have to wait for the store cache to flush which may take 2 hours. Then I can delete this database.

Well I have things to do. I can’t wait around all day until Exchange decides it can find all the replicas for this database.  So firing up ADSIEDIT I find the Exchange Administrative Group for 2007, drill down to the Server CN.  Next I expand the container for the server with the wayward public folder and expand the information store container.  Expand the Storage group and delete the database. Now all that’s left is to manually delete the edb file and logs and I can fix my mistake and go home on time.