Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

For those of us Exchange admins who aren’t fully up to date with Exchange 2010 service packs (for whatever reason – don’t berate us) and have slowly been getting annoyed with an ever increasing amount of mailboxes that get automapped in Outlook 2007 and 2010 can rejoice. One of our staff spent 10 minutes reearching, understanding and writing a bit of Powershell to resolve the issue en-bulk.

Just run the following under a Powershell instance with the Exchange modules loaded (i.e. the Exchange Management Shell).

foreach ($u in $(Get-User)) { Write-Host "Clearing the msExchDelegateListLink for $($u.distinguishedname)"; $ad = [adsi]"LDAP://$($u.originatingserver)/$($u.distinguishedname)"; $ad.msExchDelegateListLink.Clear(); $ad.SetInfo(); }

Be aware that if you do this, all auto mappings for all users will get removed. This may not have the desired behaviour as some users may be relying on an automapped account. It should be feasible to alter this as required, as it’s pretty damn simple!

As with all things, do this at your own risk, we accept no liability, yadda yadda yadda.

If you’re curious (and lets face it, if you’re modifying the Active Directory en bulk, you should be!), basically what this does is loop over all users, and clear all values against their Active Directory account msExchDelegateListLink attribute. This attribute is where the automapping gets written to.

As an example imagine 2 users, Bob and Alice. Bob is an Exchange admin and at some point was granted full access (with permission, naturally) to diagnose a problem with Alice’s mailbox without having to disturb her too much directly. Bob will now be added to Alice’s msExchDelegateListLink attribute. It’s this entry that needs to be removed.

Apparently in SP2 there is the facility to disable automapping, at the time of adding the relevant permission; the shiny new “-AutoMapping” argument to Add-MailboxPermission. As with many things Exchange 2007 and newer, it’s just a facility available at the Powershell console, for now. And you know what? We’re ok with that.

Posted by Karl in Applications, Cool Stuff, Scripting, Servers | No Comments »

Microsoft have announced they are updating pricing for Hosted BlackBerry Service for Exchange Online. Soon this service will be available free of charge to BPOS subscribers (new and existing).  The Hosted BlackBerry service offers increased functionality compared to the other, already free option: BlackBerry Internet Service.

Previously BPOS users who access their email via the free BlackBerry Internet Service were limited to wireless email access, pushed from the mobile operator. Other information, such as contacts and calendar data had to be updated through a wired connection.

Hosted Blackberry services allows wireless access to e-mail, calendar, tasks and contacts with global address list (GAL) integration, and device management such as device wipe and password reset.

By scrapping the current Hosted BlackBerry services pricing structure and moving towards a free service for BPOS subscribers, Microsoft will be hoping to see businesses that have come to like and possibly rely on their BlackBerry looking on the BPOS (and Office 365 in the future) offerings more favourably.

Posted by James in Applications, General, Small Business Software | 1 Comment »

Ever had request to block an e-mail address? We had one from a customer last week so we decided to use Transport rules in exchange 2007.

These work in the same sort of way that Rules do in Outlook but on a global level.

We setup a transport rule to send a rejection back to the sender, you can either leave the standard message (see Below) or you change the rejection message and error code if you wish.

You can setup transport rules through the Exchange Management console, in organization configuration, under Hub Transport go to the Transport Rules Tab and select ‘New Transport Rule’ down the right hand side.

Example of the rejection message -

You do not have permission to send to this recipient. For assistance, contact your system administrator.

<Domain.local #5.7.1 smtp;550 5.7.1 Delivery not authorized, message refused>

Posted by Dave in General | 1 Comment »

By default, in Exchange 2007, distribution groups cannot be mailed without authentication. This means that any distribution group that receives external mail will respond with a rejection, until this default behaviour is altered.

#5.7.1 smtp;550 5.7.1 RESOLVER.RST.AuthRequired; authentication required

A good idea in the face of spam, except that this change in behaviour isn’t really shouted about much in the documentation.

The GUI way to alter this is to head into the Exchange 2007 Console, head into the properities of the distribution group, and then the Mail Flow Settings. Select Message Delivery Restrictions and then click Properties. Untick “Require that all senders are authenticated”.

Posted by Karl in General | No Comments »