Category Archives: Exchange

List Exchange mailboxes with forwarding rules

Simple list of all mailboxes and rules. Displays more info if one of them contains a forwarding rule:

$mb=Get-Mailbox | Sort-Object -Property displayname
$t2=0;$t=($mb).count;$mb| ForEach-Object {write-host $t2"\"$t " " $_.displayname;$t2++;get-inboxrule -mailbox $_.alias| ForEach-Object {if($_.description -like "*forward*"){write-host $_.description -foregroundcolor red}}}

Forwarding email in Exchange

One common question from users are “How can I forward my email to my home mail?” or from a manager “How can we forward his/her mail to the external address?”. In fact in Exchange there is several possibilities, but most of them requires some administrator involvement. For users to forward their own email an administrator would have to allow it.

Users could define a forward using outlook. This requre the administartor to allow it. The administrator will have to set “AutoForwardEnabled” on “Remote Domain” : Set-remotedomain “*” -AutoForwardEnabled $true . This will ofcourse enable this for all users. They will be enables to send to det remote domain defined or all.

As an administrator you could create an exchange contact and sett this as forwarding on the mailbox in the EMC. Mailbox properties and mailbox features -> Mail flow ->delivery options: forward_emc1

forward_emcHere you can select an allready created Mail contact.

It can also be done from PowerShell, here you have one more option.forwardingaddress forwardanddeliverHer we can specify either a contact or a smtp address, but you can not use both at the same time.

set-mailbox demouser -forwardingsmtpaddress [email protected] -delivertomailboxandforward $true

This will sett forwarding for mailbox with alias demouser to [email protected] , and also deliver mail to both the forwarding address and the mailbox. One thing to notice is that for this to work you will have to add “dom.ex” as a remote domain in exchange.

 

 

Exchange UM event ID 1400

This is a rather confusing event. It occurs on the Exchange server 2010 that is holding the Unified Messaging role. “The following UM IP gateways did not respond as expected to a SIP OPTIONS request”, and at the end “This operation has timed out”. The server mentioned in the erro is, in this senario, the Lync server.exevent1400

I thought I knew this PKI stuff and I was sure that all my certificates where correct. Also when telneting for the exchange server to the Lync server on port 5061 there was most defiantly an answer – No timeout”. After a while a decided to do all my certificates all over. Replacing the Lync ,  of course made no difference. When replacing the exchange certificate I change the SN to be the FQDN of the server, This did the trick. The error message disappeared. So now I remember that on Exchange UM server keep FQDN as Subject name and place all other names as SAN’s

Outlook : Flagged messages does not show in tasklist

OutlookFlagsOnce upon a time there was several on premise mailboxes. The follow up flags were working flawlessly from Outlook running in “online mode” on a RDS server. Someone installed hybrid mode and moved the mailboxes to O365. Now the user was really disappointed with the response from Outlook still running in Online Mode. One of the users got archive mailbox enabled. The primary mailbox was moved to on premise. We now got a new issue : It was possible to tag messages with flags, but they never appeared on the task list. Where do you start to troubleshoot this? Our first check is to see use OWA. Usually this will give us a hint if it is client or server side error. And …  it looked faulty in owa. So this seems to be a mailbox error. What to do next? We tried to run Outlook with command line parameters – in this case /resettodotab . And….. that did not help. Next we tried to create new outlook mapi profile, but that did not help either. Then a more drastic approach – we did a export and import of the entire mailbox from Outlook. During the import we did select to overwrite existing elements. We also selected to start Outlook using the same command line /resettodotab. This time it worked out fine. This was a time consuming approach so now we tried to move another mailbox, with the same problem, to another mailboxdatabase and that also worked fine. Conclusion for us was to move the troublesom mailbox to another mailbox database and start Outlook with command line /resettodotab, We did not try to uninstall any office patch , since we had this problem on both Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013. This worked fine for small mailboxes (>500 MB) but not for larger ones.

Ended up creating a supportcase with Microsoft and the result of this is that this is an issue.  Senario is when a Exchange 2010 mailbox is moved to O365 (Exchange 2016) Legacy attributes are removed from the mailbox. These attributes does not exist when the mailbox is moved back to onprem (Exchange 2010) and there for issues like this will emerge.

Why does it help to move a small mailbox to a new database? According to MS support : when a small mailbox( less than 500 Mb) is moved to a new database a new content table is created,  this is not the case when you move a larger mailbox.

 

Outlook does not show online archive.

outlook2016In a hybrid environment we moved mailboxes from onprem to Office 365. Some of the users felt response from a mailbox in O365 was to slow so we enabled an archive mailbox in cloud and migrated the primary mailbox to onprem server. As soon as this was done the archive mailbox disappeared from Outlook. Tried running the “Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer” witch return the unexpected result of :

<ErrorCode>603</ErrorCode>
<Message>The Active Directory user wasn’t found.</Message>

This was quite odd since the primary mailbox works in Outlook. Tried to compare to mailboxes , on where the archive was visible and one where it was not – they looked the same. Next I ran adsiedit to compare all values in ActiveDirectory for the two account. Nothing special, except one thing. On the one that did not work the AD attribute “msExchDelegateListBL” contained reference to an old onprem shared mailbox that had previously been moved to O365. Now this made som sense when Outlook run autodiscover it try to find and connect to all mailboxes that the user has been granted full access to. To solve this I had to use adsiedit on the active directory object of the old shared mailbox. Open properties for the mailbox and removed the problem user from  the attribute “msExchDelegateListLink”.

IMAP disabled in Exchange 2013 ServerComponentState.

IMAP was enabled on the Exchange  server and had been used for a long time. One day the Exchange server’s IP subnet was placed in a Active Directory site without any Domain Controllers. Of course  Exchange the services stopped running after a while. When We managed to get it back to its original site and rebooted, everything looked OK.  But IMAP did not work. The Client software gave us the error “Invalid filed description”.

Tried to run “Test-ImapConnectivity” , error stated Authentication Failed . Verified account by successfully logging on to OWA. Reset password to be sure, same error.

Continue reading IMAP disabled in Exchange 2013 ServerComponentState.

Unable to join Lync\S4B from client schedule tab.

skypeLatest issue was kind of a puzzle. When one organization sent Skype meeting invitation to another organization it was impossible to click on the meeting in the schedule tab of Skype/Lync.

“Join” functionality missing from sceduler tab in Skype or Lync.

s4b

Right click on the meeting gave nothing. The links in Outlook and OWA did work thoe. At first we thought it was something wrong with the client installation, but several reinstalls and updates later the conclution was that there had to be something wrong with the calendar entry.

Continue reading Unable to join Lync\S4B from client schedule tab.

Exchange 2010 : MapiExceptionNetworkError

exchangeOne of our Exchange 2010 servers had its mailboxdatabases dismounted sometime during the night. When we tried to mount them we got a strange error message : “MapiExceptionNetworkError: Unable to make admin interface connection to server. (hr=0x80040115, ec=-2147221227)”

Mountdatabase

As we usually do with issued like this on Exchange is to check that all services have been started. Went into service manager and sorted on “Startup type” to see if all marked as Automatic startup was started, and they where. Next was to check all DNS records and Eventviewer. No luck. Rebooted server. Still no luck. Finally, a closer inspection, the “Microsoft Exchange Information Store” service was set to “Disabled”. Enabled and started it. Now it was possible to mount the databases. How it ended up being disabled is another issue, perhaps some update did it..

Couldn’t mount the database that you specified. Specified database: MBXDATABASE; Error code: An Active Manager operation failed with a transient error. Please retry the operation. Error: Database action failed with transient error. Error: A transient error occurred during a database operation. Error: MapiExceptionNetworkError: Unable to make admin interface connection to server. (hr=0x80040115, ec=-2147221227)

 

O365 – Error : ProvisioningFailedException: Failed to update one of the recipient properties.

office-logo_v3Trying to migrate exchange users to O365 using cutover migration. Most of mailboxes did ok, but som failed “Error  : provisioningFailedException: Failed to update one of the recipient properties.”. It would help if the error messages explained what went wrong.? Continue reading O365 – Error : ProvisioningFailedException: Failed to update one of the recipient properties.

Lync voice messages does not arrive in the mailbox.

exchangeIt is time to remind me to always check Exchange for existence of receive connectors and their scoping. In this case users where able to record voice messages, but they never arrived in recipients mailbox. Checked the Exchange server event Viewer. Continue reading Lync voice messages does not arrive in the mailbox.

Testing new email gateway software.

Scrollout Have been looking for a simple and good software to scan and forward my emails. I wanted one that was easy to install/configure and hopefully free. My last discovery is ScrolloutF1 by Marius Gologan. This is a Linux configuration based on Debian. This is not a firewall but an mail gateway so it will only need 1 ip address. It’s easy to install , basically boot from the ISO and select your regional settings (keyboard and language). After installation has finished access it through your web browser. Continue reading Testing new email gateway software.

How to reset Exchange database indexes

exchange
I know the situation, Your are using OWA, ActiveSync or Outlook (in online mode) to search for an old email. Your search request only returns new emails even though  you can browse old emails. Now there is a good chance that mailbox database index has gone corrupt. You could do a check by running Test-ExchangeSearch but this might not return an error even though the index is corrupt.

What can I do to fix this problem?

Continue reading How to reset Exchange database indexes

Out of office rule not working for one user.

OOF

One user enabled his OOF but Exchange refused to send oof messages. Tested another mailbox – worked fine. I tried to check using Get-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration and all seemed correct. Also checked that ExternalOOFOptions was enabled on his mailbox Get-Mailbox ALIAS | fl exter*  – result : ” ExternalOofOptions        : External”. Logged on to his mailbox using OWA checked that OOF was enabled and looked correct.

Continue reading Out of office rule not working for one user.

Outlook Roomlist and workinghours.

When using booking assistent and roomlist meeting rooms does not always show in the list as expected. One reason for this is that user make a default invitation and by default the meeting time is this morning witch is already passed. Another thing is that default working hour for the meeting room is 08:00 to 17:00 – outside this the room will not show in the roomlist.

workinghours

Use get-mailboxcalendarconfiguration to get workinghours for a room / mailbox.

Group Manager in Exchange 2010-2013 are unable to manage group membership.

There was a change in RBAC. Group managers are not able to add or remove members of a distribution Group even if it seems so in the Exchange Management Console.

The only options in ECP was to give them the additional permission to great and remove groups. You can create a new role that will enable this permission again. Thanks to Matthew Byrd at Microsoft who has created a Powershell script that does this for us.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2009/11/18/how-to-manage-groups-that-i-already-own-in-exchange-2010.aspx