Microsoft Exchange
Anything interesting and related to Microsoft Exchange
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Delegate Server Admin rights to another user to install Exchange 2007
I had to delegate access to an admin in another country to let him install Exchange 2007 on his new servers. The below video shows how this works as I tested this the day before hand in my lab. I did however run in to some problems in production as we have multiple domains. The Microsoft article below the video shows you to open cmd prompt and then run the commands. However check the following: 1. Always right click and choose “run as administrator” when opening the cmd prompt or you will get errors. 2. You need to browse to the Exchange install file (setup.com) in the cmd prompt before…
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Unable to expand a distribution list in Outlook – Exchange 2003 Environment
Have you ever receive an error stating that “There was an error while expanding the list. The list was not fully expanded.” when you try and expand a distribution list in Outlook? The error looks like the one below: To solve this change the list to a Universal Distribution Group. Wait for replication if need be and you will then be able to expand the list and view the members within Outlook.
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Unable to connect a disconnected mailbox – User not found error when trying to connect a mailbox to a user in Exchange
We’ve had a few instances where we need to disconnect a mailbox and reconnect it to a new user account for a user. This should be easy right? Well not always. It’s happened more than once where we try to use the Exchange Management Console to connect the mailbox to the user account but Exchange can’t find the user account. Have a look in Active Directory and the account shows up. You then try to connect the mailbox to the user account using the Exchange Management Shell with the same results. user not found. See below on how to get this issue resolved: 1. Open adsiedit.msc (start, run and type…
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Outlook Web Access stops working after renewing 3rd party Certificate
We had an interesting issue this week. We renewed our Exchange certificate with a 3rd party vendor. Installed the certificate on Exchange and ISA Server. OWA access from the internet stopped working after we installed the certificates. We tested OWA internally and it worked which pointed to something on the ISA server. After a long investigation we found the issue to be ISA running on Windows 2003 which is not compatible with the Secure Hash Algorithm 2 (SHA2) family of hashing algorithms that the certificates from our 3rd party cert provider issues. Microsoft has a hotfix available to get around this. We were able to access OWA from the internet…
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E-Mail delivers to Deleted Items folder
We had a shared mailbox where all the mail sent to the mailbox delivered to the deleted items folder. To resolve this do the following: 1. Open Exchange Management Shell 2. Type Get-CalendarProcessing “mailboxname” | fl and press enter 3. If AutomateProcessing shows AutoAccept in the returned results then run the next cmdlet 4. Set-CalendarProcessing “mailboxname” -automateprocessing none 5. Wait for replication and check that Get-CalendarProcessing “mailboxname” | fl shows that it’s set to :none We verified after running the above that mail delivered to the mailbox deliveres to the Inbox as expected.
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Microsoft Exchange Replication Service Starts and then Stops
We had an Exchange 2007 CCR cluster where the passive node databases stopped seeding. After some investigation we noticed that the Exchange Replication Service starts and a second or two later stops. The event log did not give us much information, only stating that the service started and stopped again. We checked all the databases on the passive node and noticed that they were in a dirty shut down state as the logs stopped replaying to the database a few days earlier. Resolution that worked for us: 1. Move each database to a new folder on the disk that it resides. 2. Start the Exchange Replication Service. (We monitored the…
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Unable to logon to a reconnected mailbox in Exchange 2010
I tested a few things today and one of them was to disable my mailbox in Exchange 2010. After running Clean-MailboxDatabase databasename I was able to see the disconnected mailbox and reconnect it to my user account. I then tried to login into my mailbox using Outlook and Outlook WebApp. It looked like it was connecting in Outlook but the mailbox showed disconnected. Outlook Webapp returned with an error that my account is disabled. To rectify this I just ran Clean-MailboxDatabase databasename again from Exchange Power Shell and was able to logon in Outlook WebApp and Outlook. Note that running this cmdlet did not show the disabled mailbox immediately so don’t be alarmed, just…
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Delivery has failed to these recipients or groups: Your message can’t be delivered because delivery to this address is restricted.
You probably have a lot of devices like printers, main frames and other non Microsoft systems sending mail to distribution groups inside your organisation. If that’s the case and you receive an NDR as per below screenshot then you need to check authentication settings on the distribution group. I recently had this problem where mail would not deliver to the recipients and after some testing we were able to generate the above NDR. The Distribution Group was set t only allow mail from authenticated users thus the reason for the mail delivery failure. The main frame is not able or setup to authenticate with Active Directory and could not send mail…
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Exchange 2003 Services won’t start – Event ID’s 9175, 2114 and 1005
Exchange Server 2003 services does not want to start or takes a long time to start for all the Exchange servers in the same site. We had this issue and found that the Exchange servers tried to authenticate with a domain controller in another site. I found that the Exchange servers had the local Domain Controllers configured in Exchange and could contact the servers using ping and telnet. The application log showed 3 errors that were related to the Exchange Servers not being able to authenticate to the local Domain Controllers. The event ID’s were 9175, 2114 and 1005. Solution: Add the “Manage auditing and security log” permission under “local…
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High Memory Pages/Sec on an Exchange 2010 Server
We had an issue on an Exchange 2010 multi role server this week where the average Memory Pages/Second exceeded 3000. Microsoft recommends that the average Pages/Second should be below 1000. After some investigation we found that the antivirus software was scanning the Exchange folders and log files. For a quick test we disabled the antivirus agent on the server and the average Pages/Second dropped significantly. There could be countless reasons for above normal Memory Pages/Second issues but checking your antivirus software is a quick check. The exclusions in the antivirus software was then configured and the issue was permanently resolved. Note that you should never scan your Exchange log files…