E-mail Address Policies control how Exchange displays a user's secondary email address. When you need additional SMTP addresses for your users,
create a new E-mail Address Policy. These polices are stored separately, and behave differently, from the other types of Microsoft Group Policy.
Topics for E-mail Address Policies in Exchange Server 2010
Exchange Server 2010 gives every mailbox-enabled user a default SMTP email address in the format: logonName @
anotherdom.com. The point of an E-mail Address Policy is to tell Exchange 2010 how to define
extra email addresses for users, groups or contacts.
Take as an example, a company with a main email address of
anotherdom.com. Suppose
that this company bought a second company called companyB.net. Wouldn't it be useful if
the companyB.net people could receive email addressed to accounts in both
domains? No problem, use Exchange 2010 to create E-mail Address Policies which adds a
secondary SMTP address to their email settings.
There are two ways of creating and managing E-mail Address policies, via
the Exchange Management Console (EMC) or with a PowerShell cmdlet.
EMC Method
Launch the Exchange Console and drill down to the Hub Transport
folder.
In the action pane, click New E-mail Address Policy.
The trick is to select the recipient container where the filter is
going to apply.
It's worth checking the conditions page to fine tune your policy.
Probably the most important page is where you specify the SMTP E-Mail
Addresses.
Consider an email address: guyt@anotherdom.com. Here is an example of the logic that Exchange 2010 uses to define the left part of the email address. Exchange takes
a user account alias,
guyt in our example, the E-mail Address Policies then calculates the left side of the @, e.g. guyt@. and adds it to the domain name
anotherdom.com.
Exchange will set the
left part of the email address = logonName. And you may wish to change this format with one or more of these clever variables. For example, to build the displayName from the first 3 letters of the firstname added to the first 4 letters of the last name. The secret of custom SMTP addresses is to control this family of % variables:
%g = givenName. %s = sn (Last name). %4s = means first four
letters of sn. %d = displayName. %m = Exchange alias.
Example: %3g.%4s@anotherdom.com translates to = guy.thom@anotherdom.com
Where can you see these actual email addresses? Open Active Directory Users and Computers, select the user, properties tab and the Exchange e-mail tab.
Although the above E-mail address policies generate a secondary address
nothing happens until you 'Apply' it, using the menu option in the EMC's
Action pane.
Creating E-mail Address Policy with PowerShell
The name of this cmdlet is New-EmailAddressPolicy, if you subsequently
want to make changes use Set-EmailAddressPolicy.
Guy Recommends: SolarWinds' Free Bulk Mailbox Import Tool
Import users from a spreadsheet, complete with their mailbox. Just provide a list of the
users with the fields in the
top row, and save as .csv file. Then launch this FREE utility, match
your Exchange fields with AD's
attributes, click and import the users. Optionally, you can
provide the name of the OU where the new mailboxes will be born.
There are also two bonus tools in the free download, and all 3 have been approved by Microsoft:
Bulk-import new users and mailboxes into Active Directory.
Whereas Exchange 2010 uses E-mail Address Policies, Exchange 2003 uses
Recipient Policies to control how Exchange displays secondary email
addresses. Another change in Exchange 2010 is that LDAP filters have been
replaced by OPATH syntax.
You can use the -RecipientFilter to mimic, or improve upon the Exchange
2003 LDAP filter.
You need PowerShell's braces { } around the entire OPATH syntax string.
Here are the filtering operators, note you introduce each with a -hyphen.
-and
-or
-not
-eq (equals)
-ne (not equal)
-lt (less than)
-gt (greater than)
-like (string comparison)
-notlike (string comparison)
Guy Recommends: A Free Trial of the Network Performance Monitor
(NPM)
SolarWinds'
Network Performance Monitor
will help you discover what's happening on your network. This
utility will also guide you through troubleshooting; the dashboard will
indicate whether the root cause is a broken link, faulty equipment or
resource overload.
What I like best is the way NPM suggests solutions to network
problems. Its
also has the ability to monitor the health of individual VMware
virtual machines. If you are interested in troubleshooting, and creating
network maps, then I recommend that you try NPM now.
If your Windows Exchange 2010 E-mail Address Policies works first time, then you are a genius. However, if at first nothing seems to happen, here are tips to help you resolve the problem.
Note 1: If no email addresses seem to be created, then
navigate to the E-mail Address Policies folder, right-click and Apply this
policy now..
Note 2:
Did you
notice how the 'Apply this policy now... is 'greyed out'? Hmmm.. what could be the reason? The answer is that Guy did not choose any settings for the filter. So, do not make
this mistake, go back to your policies and select the Filter button, next click Add. Did you see an LDAP query appear in the window? Then great, your E-mail Address Policies has every chance of working
-
provided that you click on Apply this policy now.
Naturally, if you are even a minor expert in LDAP, then you can fine-tune the policy so that only a sub-set of users receive the policy, for example all users in the PlanB department.
Solution: Move Policy 2) Priority above Policy 1). See Move Up in the diagram above. The result of promoting Policy 2) is that all those who are in
department = PlanB now get Policy 2). If you are wondering about the rest of the users who do not match Policy 2), they will all match Policy 1) so all just receive the one email address.
Trap: Another variation of this problem is that users receive the secondary address but no primary email address. An example of this variation is Policy 3), where only one
email address is configured instead of two. To experience this problem, Policy 3) would have to be moved up to the top of the list.
»
Summary of E-mail Address Policies in Exchange 2010
Time spent creating Exchange Sever 2010's E-mail Address Policies will repay with interest. When your users need a secondary email address, then launch the EMC to navigate
to the Hub Transport container and the wizard will assist you creating the
policy. Alternatively, use PowerShell and New-EmailAddressPolicy.
If you like this page then please share it with your friends
Here is a
free tool to monitor your Exchange Server.
Download the utility, then inspect your mail queues, monitor Exchange server's
memory, confirm there is enough disk space and check the CPU utilization.
