Digital Press 4 Exchange Server

I had a case way back a year ago but wanted to post the steps as one of my friends recently asked the steps.

If you want to Restrict certain users from sending/receiving mails from the internet. However they  should be able to send and receive mails internally, Follow these steps.

- Created a Security Group (named InternalMail) within Active Directory Users and
Computers and added some users into it.
- Created a recipient policy with the domain as @test.local and set filter to
the Security Group.
- Created a SMTP connector and on the Delivery Restriction tab, added the Security
Group into the Reject messages from option.
- Followed the article 277872 to add a value to the registry to check connector
restrictions.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/Resvc/Parameters/

Added the value CheckConnectorRestrictions and set the value to 1.

XCON: Connector Delivery Restrictions May Not Work Correctly
<http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;277872>

RELATED KNOWLEDGE BASE ARTICLES
=================================
How to restrict the users who can send inbound Internet e-mail to another user or
to a distribution group in Exchange 2003
<http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;827616>

How to restrict the outflow of large messages using an SMTP Connector
<http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;555260>

Outlook clients are presented with the  global address list (GAL) when they address a message. By default,  the only GAL available is the aptly named default global address list, which includes all mail-enabled,  unhidden recipients in Active Directory. Building more than one GAL might also be useful; this  would be good for organizations that don’t want the entire organization to be visible in the global  address list. Multiple GALs are also useful for application service providers (ASPs) that host more  than one company in the same Exchange organization. Read the rest of this entry »

When the migration to Exchange 2007 is complete most organizations will uninstall the Exchange 2003 in org, but may fail to do so if they donot delete the Public Folder store on the 2003 Exchange server.

Follow the steps below to delete the Public Folder Store.

1. Make sure Windows Support Tools are installed. Dismount the public store.

2. Do Start, Run, “adsiedit.msc”.

 3. Go to the Configuration Container, expand Configuration, Services and then go to the following object: CN=,CN=InformationStore,CN=,CN=Servers,CN=,CN=Administrative Groups,CN=,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services You should see your public store to the right as “CN=”. Right-click on this object and choose delete. After this you should be able to do a refresh in Exchange System Manager and no longer see the public folder store (keep in mind there may be AD replication delays if you have multiple DC’s).

4. In Adsiedit, under Configuration, Services, go to the following object: CN=Folder Hierarchies,CN=,CN=Administrative Groups,CN=,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services On the right side of the screen, right-click on “CN=Public Folders” and get Properties. Highlight the property called “msExchOwningPFTreeBL” and click Edit. Look through the list of stores and confirm you no longer see the public store you just deleted in this list.

5. You will need to delete the public store database files (the EDB and STM files) manually. On a new server, these files will be very small, so if you forget about this, don’t worry about it, it won’t hurt anything. By default these files will be named pub1.edb and pub1.stm, but they could have been renamed–make sure you don’t accidentally delete the wrong database files. Also, don’t delete any other files in any of your mdbdata directories if you intend to keep any mailbox stores in production on the Exchange server in question. The mailbox databases will share .LOG and .CHK files with the public store, and you can cause problems if you delete those files.

Forest Prep

During the first Exchange 2003 Setup installation, a process called  forest prep creates additional classes  and new attributes. This process also promotes over 200 additional attributes to the Global Catalog. All in all, over 2000 changes are made to AD.

 The Exchange 2003 Setup program will go through the schemax.ldf files found in the Exchange 2003 \Setup\I386\Exchange directory and import each of them using the Windows 200x LDIFDE utility. There are 10 of these files, numbered schema0.ldf through schema9.ldf; they contain all of the changes needed to extend the schema.

 TIP: Exchange 2007 has around 100 of the these ldf files just an indication of the amount of schema Updates taking place. Read the rest of this entry »

DSACCESS and DSPROXY are two terms every Exchange Admin must be aware of, I will try to explain each of the terms in this post.

DSACCESS:
DSAccess keeps a list of the domain controllers in its domain; if there is more than one domain controller, DSAccess will perform a “round-robin” query. When querying information about mailbox-enabled users, mail-enabled users, mail-enabled contacts, public folders, or other mail recipients, DSAccess first sends a query to a domain controller; if this query fails, DSAccess then queries a Global Catalog server.
This information is held in the DSAccess cache in order to improve performance and reduce the number of queries to Active Directory. The DSAccess cache holds up to 50MB of data and holds entries for five minutes. The DSAccess cache, when set at the default 50MB, will hold approximately 6500 entries; each entry consumes approximately 7.5KB. The DSAccess cache process requires approximately 2.5MB, which leaves about 47.5MB for data caching. Never set the DSAccess cache size below 2.5MB Read the rest of this entry »

People ask about how to stop spammers, or make Exchange a stronger for defending itself for the endless spam war. Receiving blank messages or spam makes a business valuable time and resources waste, and top of that we have to deal with angry managers and unhappy users. I have decided to put some notes together for those who need some guides in order to achieve goal of making Exchange a little bit more secure and strong.. Read the rest of this entry »

In this scenario, the users are getting NDRs that System Attendant cannot be reached… and when we try to move the mailbox to and from the server, the error says:
“The attempt to log on to the Microsoft Exchange Server computer has failed. The MAPI provider failed. Microsoft Exchange Server Information Store ID no: 8004011d-0512-00000000” Read the rest of this entry »

We can know that if we have installed Exchange Server 2003 in a box, we can find  corresponding Registry Keys in the following location,
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall, Read the rest of this entry »