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Exchange 2007 Mobile Messaging

I would be a bad Exchange dude if I didn't throw out a mention to a series of Exchange Team Blog articles posted in the last week about the administrator and client experiences when it comes to Exchange mobile messaging (the BlackBerry killer, right?).

• Exchange 2007 ActiveSync Policies
• Windows Mobile 6 and Exchange 2007
• Managing your device from OWA 2007 SP1

If you don't find the content useful, most of it is, you can at least show off the postings to your management to convince them that yes, this is a much lower maintenance system than BES.

Windows Vista Firewall Primer

In case you have been living under a rock, or have a severe aversion to Windows Vista, you should know that the firewall included in the product is back and better than ever.

For enterprise environments, the amount of control leveraged through group policies is staggering, and extremely useful in controlling and deploying an enterprise-wide protection strategy.

My man Steve Reily, who is also off to TechEd to give some more of his great talks, covers the basics of why you need the Vista firewall, why you don't need another third-party firewall, and how to configure some of the new features of the Vista Firewall. The entire TechNet Magazine this month is dedicated to security and is worth a read.

Once again, off to TechEd!

I am less than a week from touchdown in beautiful Orlando, Florida for another Microsoft TechEd adventure. Vista, Exchange 2007, System Center, and the further emergence of virtualization and mobile devices will be all the buzz around the convention center and beyond.

This will be my fourth TechEd, and third consecutive. I really enjoy this yearly gathering of the geeks. TechEd is much less marketing than some other conferences that I have attended. I look to make contacts, to socialize with my fellow admins, and to pry into the brains of the "blue shirts", all the while feasting on the snacks and keeping hydrated for the sun.

If you would like to catch up, or just say "hi" out there in bloglandia, you can IM me via WLM, dillfish-at-hotmail.com. I'll be on the laptop between sessions, most likely keeping this blog up to date with the latest goodness.

Microsoft updates virtualization calculator

The virtualization calculator has been updated. Thanks to virtualization.info for the heads up. This is a great tool for all companies to give some insight into the cost savings of virtualized datacenters.

Calculating how many Microsoft licenses you need in your virtualization infrastructure is not an easy task. Windows edition (Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter) can severely impact on final price and opportunity to grow. And back-end servers like SQL Server are part of this equation too.

Access it here.

Source: Microsoft launches Virtualization Calculator 2.0

Exchange – Redirect mail to "null"

Here's a fun trick that you can use sometime. I've had it in my "bag 'o fun" for years and years now. I forget the Exchange admin who taught me this trick, but I'm sure I was like 16 or 17 when I learned it.

Take the following scenario, you have a mailbox. You've created a rule in that mailbox to delete items when they arrive. That still leaves a loophole that they might sit in the deleted items folder, or you have to carry them for x days as part of the deleted item retention (dumpster).

However, for support reasons you don't want to return an NDR for that mailbox if you go and delete it. You just want the mail to disappear. Here's what you do...

Create a distribution list with no members. Turn off delivery responses and hide it from the GAL. Then, change your mailbox settings to forward all mail to the distribution list. Voila! Deleted mail without an NDR.

You can even leave the old mailbox in the GAL for that warm, fuzzy support reason, but the messages sent to it will never be seen or heard from again!

Cool, huh? Even better, this works for all versions of Exchange.

For large organizations, you might want to have several of these, and have the DL expansion take place on, or near, the mailbox server that houses the to-be-blackholed mailbox.

In Exchange 2007, you can write a transport rule to handle this task.

$cond = Get-TransportRulePredicate SentTo

$cond.Addresses = @((Get-Mailbox "mailboxalias"))

[dillon note: the Addresses parameter can contain multiple values, and types (mailbox, contact, distributionGroup). See the get-help for the New-TransportRule command for details.]

$act = Get-TransportRuleAction DeleteMessage

New-TransportRule -Name "Email Blackhole" -Comments "Messages matching this criteria passing thtrough the HT server will be dropped." -Condition @($cond) -Action @($act)

Lastly, an alternate version...if you don't need the mailbox/dl/contact to show in the GAL, add the SMTP address of the address you would like mail to disappear for to the SMTP addresses of the empty distribution list. This applies to all versions of Exchange.