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Microsoft Exchange Email Address Variables

digitalkid — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:40:31 +0000

From time to time it is necessary to apply an email address policy using a non-standard name for the user (e.g. instead of the users alias JOHN@DOMAIN.COM you need JSMITH@DOMAIN.COM). This can be accomplished across the entire organization by editing the Recipient Policies/email Address policies and using the following variables before (to the left of…) the @ symbol in the domain. Here are the variables and some examples:

%g = givenName (First Name)

%s = sn (surName or Last Name)

%d = Display Name

%m Exchange Alias (Usually default for email addresses).

Here are some examples of how to combine and use these variables to customize your Recipient Policy/Email Addresses.

%1g.%s@DOMAIN.COM — This will give you j.smith@DOMAIN.COM

%g%s@DOMAIN.COM — This will give you johnsmith@DOMAIN.COM

%g@DOMAIN.COM — This will give you john@DOMAIN.COM

I am sure there are more that I can think of but you get the idea.

Custom Attributes and Exchange 2007 Email Address Policies

digitalkid — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:38:08 +0000

There are a lot of useful things that can be accomplished using Custom Attributes in Exchange 2007. This Doc applies to Recipient Policies (email Address Policies) and applying email addresses to users based on their custom attributes. This is useful when you have multiple domain names that you need to receive mail for as well as multiple users that need to have their primary email address in a domain that is different from the default domain.

First, create an Accepted Domain by navigating to Organization Configuration > Hub Transport. Click “New Accepted Domain” in the Action Pane. Fill in all of the domain information as needed and continue below.

1. Create your Email address Policy: Open Exchange Management Console and navigate to Organization Configuration > Hub Transport and click the “Email Address Policies” Tab. In the Action Pane, click “New Email Address Policy”

2. When the new email address policy wizard starts, Give your Policy a name (Does not have to be the domain name but it is a good idea to use the domain name for ease of future understanding). Click Next.

3. On this page, choose the condition “Custom Attribute 1 Equals Value”. Below that (Step 2) click “Specified” and enter a value for the custom attribute (Once again, I use the domain name) click Add then OK. Click Next.

4. Add the email address. Click Add and choose the format you would like to use (Pretty self explanatory when looking at it). Also, select the accepted domain for email address that you created earlier for this domain. Click Next twice and you are done.

5. Now, to apply this policy based on custom attribute, choose the users that this policy will apply to and change their Custom Attribute value to match the one you created in step 3 above. Navigate to Organization Configuration > Recipient Configuration and edit each user to apply this policy to (On the general tab, choose custom attribute and enter your value).

That is it. All users with the specific Custom Attribute will have the email address that corresponds to that attribute in the Email Address Policy that you created. You can do this for as many domains as there are Custom Attribute Fields.

Send-As a Distribution Group Exchange 2007

digitalkid — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:18:23 +0000

I have had many requests over the past year from users that want to send as a distribution group as opposed to their primary account. This is useful when a user wants to send out something like an invoice from an email address such as accounting@domain.com. Fortunately, there is a way to easily grant a user or users permissions to send-as a distribution group using the Exchange Management Shell – Here is how:

1. Open the Exchange Management Shell as an Administrator.

2. Type in the following command, replacing GROUPNAME and USERNAME with the name of the distribution group that you want to grant the user(s) access to send as and the username(s) of the users that will be able to send-as this distribution group.

Add-ADPermission GROUPNAME -ExtendedRights Send-As -user USERNAME

Once you have entered that command for all of the users that will be sending as the distribution group, the user can now select the group in the FROM field of their Outlook client and send the message as that distribution group.

DigitalKid (jason)
www.954network.com

Symantec Backup Exec 10d-11d-12.X email alert configuration.

digitalkid — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:39:56 +0000

Firstly, I would like to say hello again. I have not posted in quite a while as I have been preoccupied with the holidays and the end of the tax year and beginning of the new year.

Now that we have that out of the way, I have seen a lot of people wondering how to configure email alerts from Symantec BackupExec. Most are having issues receiving the alerts once they have configured the server settings. The application seems to not want to send email through a local Exchange Server (Relay). I have had this issue in the past myself and have a few ways to get around this that I thought I would share with you - so lets get started.

First off, when configuring the Alert Settings, in older versions of BackupExec (9.X, 10.X, 11.X), you will notice that there are no options for SMTP authentication, which means you need a relay. One way around this is if your ISP allows you to relay through their servers when behind an IP assigned by them. If this applies to you, you can ask them what their outbound SMTP server address is and use that as a relay. This typically works with BellSouth and FDN in my experience. Ask your ISP or just test this configuration and see if it works with your Internet Provider.

The second method is relatively easy and only requires that you use localhost as your SMTP server. You can do this in a few situations. The first is if you have BackupExec installed on your Exchange server or SBS Server locally. Simply open Exchange System Manager, Expand Administrative Groups > First Administrative Group > Servers > [You Server Name] > Protocols > SMTP. Right Click the Default SMTP Virtual Server and choose properties. Go to the Access tab and click the Relay button. You should see that your local subnet as well as the local host are allowed to relay. If you do not see this, add these items to the allow relay list and configure BackupExec to use Localhost (127.0.0.1) as the mail server. Test these settings under the recipients configuration. This should also work for remote machines, just add the IP address of the remote machine that you want to allow to relay.

The third method uses the MAPI configuration. To do this, you will need to create a contact in Active Directory Users and Computers that has the email address that you would like to receive alerts to assigned to it. I am not going to go into how to create a contact in this post. After creating the contact, open BackupExec, go to Email and Pager notifications. Choose the MAPI Configuration tab and specify your Exchange Server under MAPI mail server. For mailbox name, Specify the contact that you created earlier. When messages are sent to this contact, they should go to the email address that is associated with the contact. I am not sure if this works on servers that are remote to the Exchange server though so you will have to experiment if your BackupExec installation is not on the same machine that Exchange lives on.

If all of the above do not work for you, I suggest upgrading to the latest version of BackupExec (version 12.X as of this post) which allows SMTP authentication to be configured for outbound email. Alternatively, you could install SMTP on a remote server (whether it runs BackupExec or not) and allow relay only from the servers that you want alerts sent from. This can be done under Add/Remove Programs > Add/Remove Windows Components: Under – Application Server > Internet Information Services > SMTP Service. I will not go into the details of this configuration but it is fairly easy to set up and as always, google.com can assist.

Jason (Digitalkid)
www.954network.com

Forward Exchange Mail to Blackberry

digitalkid — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 18:53:56 +0000

Blackberry, while a great smart phone, does not have any built in capabilities to Sync with an Exchange Server (Active Sync) like Windows Mobile and others do. There is one alternative to this and that is to forward a copy of the incoming email to a particular user to the devices email address. Here is how this can be done:

1. Create a Blackberry account if you do not already have one and assign the device an email address. I usually use [phonenumber]@provider.blackberry.net. Once that is created, send a test message to the address to ensure it is working. Also, change the “Reply To:” address on that email address to the users Exchange email address.

2. On your Exchange server, create a contact (Something like username-MOBILE) and set the smtp address for the contact to the address created for the device in the step above.

3. Open the properties of the user in Active Directory Users and Computers and go to the “Exchange General” tab. Click Delivery Options and change the “Forward to:” option. Choose the contact that you created in step 2 above. Also, make sure you check the box “Deliver messages to both forwarding address and mailbox” or the user will only receive email on the Blackberry.

That is it. Once you have completed the steps above, you can send a test message to the users Exchange email address and have them check to see if it was received in both locations. Also have the user reply to the test from their Blackberry to ensure that the address the reply comes from is their Exchange email address.

Jason (Digitalkid)
www.954network.com