Exchange - where email goes to die - The Something Awful Forums

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Exchange - where email goes to die

adaz: Mar 7, 2009

Cuddly Coach posted:

This may be a silly question and the answer evident once we finish rolling it out...

Switching from a hosted pop/smtp email to an inhouse exchange 2010 setup. Clients are all Outlook 2010.

Out of office messages - We have several distrobution lists for email, and if someone on one of these lsits sets up an autoresponder for outofoffice, emails to list@domain.com are triggering that as well as to user@domain.com. In 2010 is there a way to only autorespond to emails at user@domain.com?

On the distribution group properties under advanced, you want to Send out-of-office message to originator turned off (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb125178.aspx).

# ¿ Jun 8, 2011 18:13

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# ¿ May 1, 2024 16:46

adaz: Mar 7, 2009

Man gently caress exchange's auto-complete cache forever and ever and ever amen. One of the most annoying "features" ever.

I'm not sure about exporting them out, but I do know if you wipe the auto-complete cache it should fix the problem. It should be under %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Outlook - ProfileName.Nk2 file and delete it, should be a fairly easy script.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2011 04:40

adaz: Mar 7, 2009

LoKout posted:

If you delete the cache and users aren't using Outlook 2007 or newer they will think their address book is gone. Users are that dumb, and Outlook 2000/03 suck like that. Unfortunately there really isn't a better way to clean them up unless you have people do it manually (highlight the entry in the auto-complete and hit delete).

This is true, although telling them all to type in the partial name and hitting Ctrl-K to it'll autocomplete them will help 90% of them through it (this should work on 2003 and later I believe).

# ¿ Jun 9, 2011 05:27

adaz: Mar 7, 2009

Linux Nazi posted:

You can't really blame exchange here, it is really only "at fault" for clients that support "roaming autocomplete lists", which currently is just Outlook 2010, and maybe the latest version for Macs.

The nickname cache is part of the outlook functionality. When they moved it serverside with the roaming autocomplete it's supposed do it's own housekeeping, though honestly I've not had enough users that use Outlook 2010 and then go through a migration to really get a feel for how well it works.

This is true, it's not really exchange's fault so much as outlook, and I am happy they seem to have finally fixed it in 2010. I just started using 2010 a month or so back and, so far, the roaming autocomplete seems to be working as advertised. We shall see! It'll certainly be nicer for users so that they don't "LOSE ALL MY ADDRESSES!!!" every time they get a new machine/get reimaged/moved computers.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2011 16:00

adaz: Mar 7, 2009

mindphlux posted:

I'm new to this whole thing, why is that? I mean 'cloud' anything is pretty dumb in my opinion, but... This is the first client I've had who requested hosted exchange so I set them up the best I could - usually I just manage an inhouse server.

Largely depends on your requirements and who you go with in my experience talking to people about it. We're moving to BPOS (or whatever microsoft renamed it) q3 for about 17,000 users and it's honestly going to save us a fortune. Unfortunately, the amount of stuff that kind of doesn't work/outright broken is high, and the admin tools still need improvement. Lots of improvement.

The company my brother works for moved about ~2,000 users to BPOS a few years back and they've been largely happy with it, but the simple fact that you no longer have complete control of your environment is frustrating. No matter how great the customer service is (And by most accounts it's pretty good), it's just not the same as if you hosted it yourself. Of course, it's cheap so there is that.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2011 06:48

adaz: Mar 7, 2009

mindphlux posted:

ok, how the gently caress does this work

this seriously bugged the everliving poo poo out of me - every hosted exchange provider I researched, their migration process was pretty much 'export and upload .pst files from individual users computers' which is COMPLETELY ridiculous to me. I mean the time I spent on just 8 users, jesus loving christ.

how does this work when you have 17,000 goddamn users? noone would give me a straight answer when I asked pretty much the same question - like "ok, what if I had more than 8 users...?"

I just can't imagine a hosted exchange company existing without having developed some foolproof nice clean way to migrate accounts en bulk from AD/Exchange to their bullshit cloud solution, but apparently they all haven't developed this capability and everyone buys their poo poo anyways

argh

For BPOS how it works, or how we are doing it (there are multiple ways), is you setup a federated exchange connection with their servers and they basically make mailbox copies & point everything to their servers. Actually, you can leave the federation in place for as long as you need to allow failing back to the non-hosted mailboxes if you desire.

The actual copy of course takes awhile, we have multiple GigE internet connections but it'll still be a many-week thing. Interestingly enough, if you do it this way (with the federation) you can do it during business hours if you choose, the users won't know much until they stop getting mail delivered to their old environment. Then, the next time they sign on with the bpos client software, they will pick up their new mailbox. The only thing that's really broken during the migration is free/busy time between the hosted users and the users who still haven't migrated (which is a pain, granted).

e; Once you have finished migration then you switch your mx records and all that and shut down the federation (or you can leave it up, it saves having to reload profiles)

adaz fucked around with this message at 07:07 on Jun 10, 2011

# ¿ Jun 10, 2011 07:01

adaz: Mar 7, 2009

Chaucer posted:

Question about Exchange hosted on BPOS: if I want to dump a mailbox to PST, do I have to use Outlook to export or is there something like what ExMerge did?

You have to use outlook unless they are adding that feature in the next wave of updates which I shamefully haven't looked at the feature list yet.

e: Looking into it further, the only way to export it out locally is a exchange binary file, which is BPOS specific and can only be handled by it. So it will allow local backups, if you care, but those backups can then only be loaded into a bpos environment.

adaz fucked around with this message at 07:42 on Jun 10, 2011

# ¿ Jun 10, 2011 07:31

adaz: Mar 7, 2009

Drumstick posted:

It is a Mail Enabled Distribution List, and it is not hidden. It will show under All Groups in the address book, but not under the global address list.

What is the showInAddressBook property set to? My guess is you are missing the default global address list.

Only registered members can see post attachments!

# ¿ Jun 23, 2011 16:45

adaz: Mar 7, 2009

Drumstick posted:

Yes, it does have all the same values as the one in your picture. Sorry for the delay, it was lunch.
Edit:

Got it, used Get-OfflineAddressBook | Update-OfflineAddressBook to update the address book. Thanks for the help though!

Didn't even think about the offline address book, we have ours disabled because I got too angry at it :argh:

(also our users are always on via lan)

# ¿ Jun 23, 2011 23:22

adaz: Mar 7, 2009

You probably want to use Get-inboxrule (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd351062.aspx) to see what you had set and Disable-Inboxrule to shut off your old custom one (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd298120.aspx)

# ¿ Jun 29, 2011 23:54

adaz: Mar 7, 2009

Telex posted:

That didn't find it and neither did the other thing.

I think that the OOF assistant saves that rule tab in a super special place that isn't covered in anything naturally available in the powershell by default.

So I just wiped a machine, changed his password and logged in as him on a 2010 machine and I was able to get the OOF assistant to open and could delete the rule from there. I don't really know how to explain it and MS doesn't have many answers.

Oh, Out of Office rules have their own special cmdlets, i thought you had setup it up as a rule. I mean, it's too late now but I wonder if the various *-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration cmdlets would've shown it http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd638081.aspx

# ¿ Jun 30, 2011 23:14

adaz: Mar 7, 2009

Moey posted:

So what is everyone using for mail archiving?

We have been using GFI Mail Archiver, but our licensing ran out (or we exceeded users) about two months ago. I found that out yesterday when I went to go check on a users mailbox. We were not actually using it for having users archive mail, it was just logging all sent and received mail for legal/management reasons.

The time has come to either cough up the cash for an upgrade and more users or something different. I was able to find an open source solution as well (MailArchiva). Anyone using that? https://www.mailarchiva.com/

We currently have around 260 users, their mailboxes are capped at 2gb.

Exchange 2010? It's nice, built in, and server side. Certainly works better than most of the other crap.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2011 22:25

adaz: Mar 7, 2009

JBark posted:

Well, it's a week later and I just did my first mailbox move using rich coexistence after days and days of nonstop setup. So far, so good. Everything works just like they say, and it's amazing to see free/busy syncing correctly between internal 2003 and Office 365. I've got mailboxes on 2003, 2010 and 365, and they all send/receive perfectly and single signon works everywhere. drat confusing when I actually sit down an map out the design, but it does work.

The ExDeploy docs are super, super helpful, but holy gently caress did I hit about a million gotchas going through the steps. But I was able to either google every one or find a fix on the 365 forums.

Biggest annoyance are the drat SSL certs, as usual. 99% of the problems I hit were cert related. Especially using a wildcard cert from a Verisign reseller instead of some crazy expensive SAN cert direct from Verisign/DigiCert/etc. The only complete roadblock was Forefront, since they only allow TLS ESMTP certs that are signed from a root CA on the MS list. The docs say you MUST use ESMTP to send between cloud and internal, but I found they're full of poo poo with Office 365 Enterprise, since you have full control of Forefront and can just allow a regular SMTP connection instead. That took care of the internal->365 mail flow, and coming the other way TLS is fine.

Overall, I'm impressed with the documentation most of all, considering I did all of this having never actually installed Exchange from scratch before, though I've got years of experience working with it for clients are my previous jobs.

That is really great to hear, we're going to start out inhouse to 365 migration Q4 now apparently. I'm just worried about some of the real dumb custom stuff and how well it'll migrate (things like rooms/resources with specified people who can reserve & permissions)

# ¿ Jul 19, 2011 23:15

adaz: Mar 7, 2009

JBark posted:

I just started testing the migration of shared mailboxes today, and it doesn't seem to keep the access/send as perms, but it did keep the shared attribute, which means you don't have to assign a license to it. Shouldn't have to assign a license to room/equip mailboxes either. I had to manually set the quota to 5GB (max for shared mailbox), and had to re-add the full access using the remote EMS.

And before people think "Well poo poo, why don't I just created shared mailboxes for everyone?", it won't work because each account accessing a shared mailbox must be licensed through 365 already. So make sure you do shared mailboxes last or assign a license to all users at the beginning.

Also, don't migrate a mailbox first, then try to change it to shared through the remote EMS. I hilariously borked the mailbox I was testing with, and basically had to completely remove the mailbox and start over. I think I might have even busted something on the cloud side, since I started getting lots of "mail store not responding" messages.

I had seen that the resources/shared mailboxes were "Free" as long as they were being accessed by a licensed user, but the security permissions is interesting to hear. It sounds like you have yours setup same way we do -a security group as full access owners of the mailbox then add users to that security group. Having to reapply all that is going to suck, but it's all scriptable assuming the set-mailboxpermissions cmdlet and so forth is supported by 365.

I really don't want to do the poo poo manually, we have like 300 some shared mailboxes and around 500+ resources :negative:

adaz fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Jul 22, 2011

# ¿ Jul 22, 2011 06:25

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# ¿ May 1, 2024 16:46

adaz: Mar 7, 2009

trilljester posted:

Anyone have good recommendations for hosted Exchange companies? One of our clients wants to go that route rather than host it on-site (thank god). Just looking for some reliable vendors. Thanks!

Microsoft is the only one I have direct experience with, they have been pretty good so far.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2011 18:28

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