Don’t you hate when you have large distribution groups in your environment with enabled and disabled accounts as members and when you send email messages to the account NDRs are sent throughout the environment. As may or may not know, there are options in Exchange on how to handle NDRs for distribution groups. My issue is with the options provided by Exchange, for example enabling certain features against a DG could remove valid NDRs or create a lot of false positives. To combat this probl... [More]

Here is a quick guide of how to unregister and register a mailbox for Auto Accept.   Note: The cscripts are found on the Exchange server under Program Files\Exchsrvr\Agents\AutoAccept     Unregister the mailboxes   The first thing we need to do is get a list of the AAA mailboxes. To get this list we will run the command below that will output the list to a text file.   cscript registermailbox.vbs /f:name of test file /t:domain\AAA account   ... [More]

I always find that my customers hit a stumbling block when it comes to the flexibility of move public folders. There are a lot of good articles on the internet that helps admins move public folders and I cover some of those options in this blog however, in large environments I couldn’t find any posts that provided the flexibility needed for replication of PFs. In light of this need, I created a script that allows admins to modify the PFs that want to migrate with the ability to choose whic... [More]

Recently I have been all about teaching my customers how to be prepared for disaster situations. One area that is new in Exchange 2007 is the queue database file on the HUB servers and steps needed to recover this file. What I did is put together a lab to walk through the process of copying the queue database file from one HUB server to another HUB server so that you can become familiar with the steps before you need them (or when you need them I suppose also). Environment Setup: CCR Cluster: ... [More]

Each migration I work on has a different set of requirements to move users from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. Some customers use the Exchange Manager Console to move users, which works fine. My latest customer asked me to help them move mailboxes based on users in a specific OU. So I created a powershell command that will export the alias and database for accounts that reside in a specific OU. Once we had the output file we could pipe the CSV file (with a couple modifications) into our move ma... [More]

OST file restore can cause data loss or duplicate mail content. The options below are some of the workarounds for getting data back into the database. There are other options like copying all the OST files from the local workstations, using OST2PST and then using exmerge to copy the data back. Other options include converting the OST file to a PST file, attaching the PST file to the user’s mailbox, ensuring the messages they need are there, removing the users out of cached mode, and allowi... [More]

In visiting my customers I noticed that there is generally a lack of understanding of Standby Continuous Replication (SCR). After looking around the Internet I found that there is a lack of information available on this subject. What I wanted to do is put together an article that helps setup a lab to walk through the options for SCR. Lab Setup: HC1 – Hub & CAS roles installed Node1 – First node of the cluster Node2 – Second node of the cluster CCRCluster – Name ... [More]