Emails stuck in submissions queue–Exchange 2010 sp1

While checking the message queue on a hub transport server I found many messages stuck with status retry and last error read something like the following

 400 4.4.7 The server responded with: 550 5.6.0 CAT.InvalidContent.Exception: InvalidCharsetException, Character set name (ISO-8859-6-i) is invalid or not installed.; cannot handle content of message with InternalId….

I always like to have the mail queue clear and specially submission (local deliveries), which can be a nightmare if clogged.

Resolution

by looking at the details of these messages one could tell that they are either spam of Exchange server cannot process it because the FromAddress field is <> empty.

to get rid of these messages from the queue, I just used the following cmdlet.

Get-Message -Filter {FromAddress -eq "<>"} -Server htserver | Remove-Message

Announcing the re-release of Exchange 2010 SP1 Rollup 4

“….The review completed by the Exchange CXP team determined that the issue identified in 'KB 2581545: The copy or move operation on a folder that contains subfolders does not work as expected after you install Update Rollup 4 for Exchange Server 2010 SP1 dated June 22, 2011’ introduced a serious regression in the original release of Rollup 4. As a result, a new version of Rollup 4 dated July 23, 2011 has been tested and released with the change that caused the regression removed. The re-release of Rollup 4 is tracked by 'KB 2579150: Description of Update Rollup 4 for Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1'…”

Read More

Delete emails in multiple mailboxes in Exchange 2010 SP1

Export-Mailbox is no longer supported in Exchange 2010 sp1, in stead there is New-MailboxExportRequest but the problem is that “-DeleteContents” is not supported with mailbox export.

In order to be able to search and delete emails from multiple Exchange 2010 mailboxes one has to have the following roles assigned.

New-ManagementRoleAssignment -Role "Support Diagnostics" –User username

New- ManagementRoleAssignment -Role "Mailbox Import Export" -User username

above will ensure that a user has proper permissions to perform this command.

In order to find and delete a certain email from one mailbox you can perform the following command

Search-Mailbox -Identity username -SearchQuery 'subject:"Email Subject that you want to search for"' –DeleteContent

this can be run for all mailboxes on a server as well

Get-Mailbox –Server “*servername*” –ResultSize unlimited | Search-Mailbox -SearchQuery 'subject:"Email Subject that you want to search for"' –DeleteContent

Couldn't find public folder–When Get-PublicFolderStatistics is run in Exchange 2010 SP1

 

When I tried the following cmdlet in EMS

Get-PublicFolder '\PublicfolderName' -Recurse | Get-PublicFolderStatistics

I got the following error

Couldn't find public folder "\PublicfolderName" on server "server.domain.org".
    + CategoryInfo          : InvalidData: (\PublicfolderName:PublicFolderIdParameter) [Get-PublicFolderStatistics], InvalidOperationException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : 773CD1AB,Microsoft.Exchange.Management.MapiTasks.GetPublicFolderStatistics

Couldn't find public folder "\PublicFolderName\subfolder" on server "server.domain.org".
    + CategoryInfo          : InvalidData: (\PublicFolderName\subfolder:PublicFolderIdParameter) [Get-PublicFolderStatistics], InvalidOperationException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : 773CD1AB,Microsoft.Exchange.Management.MapiTasks.GetPublicFolderStatistics

Solution

This seems to be bug (may be a feature :)

If you add the resultsize parameter to the cmdlet it works fine

Get-PublicFolder '\PublicfolderName' -Recurse | Get-PublicFolderStatistics –ResultSize unlimited

Error Mounting–Newly Created Mailbox Database in Exchange 2010 SP1

When you create a new database in a new Exchange 2010 environment following error occurs when trying to mount it.

Event ID – 15, Source – MSExchangeRepl

Active Manager failed to mount database DB2 on server servername.domain.org. Error: An Active Manager operation failed. Error: The database action failed. Error: Operation failed with message: MapiExceptionNotFound: Unable to mount database. (hr=0x8004010f, ec=-2147221233)

Resolution

Make sure that the database points to the correct Public Folder Database and has the Offline Address Book selected. After you have do the above, the database will mount correctly.

ScanMail for Microsoft Exchange – Java virtual machine is not installed

After a successful installation of ScanMail on our Exchange 2010 sp1 servers, when I tried to login to the Management site, I received the following error

Server had Internet Explorer 8 installed, I though I should try it from my Windows 7 64bit machine just to make sure that its not just the server. I received the same error on my workstation as well.

I am sure Java was installed correctly and was enabled for IE and Firefox, I tried opening the site in Firefox and got same error on all 64bit machines.

Resolution

Fix was simple

I had to install 32bit version of JRE on all 64bit machines. That solved the issue for all browsers.

thought this might be helpful for some out there.

Adding or Deleting Company Holidays to/from All Users’ Calendars–Exchange 2007

I was recently asked to figure out a silent method of adding our organization’s holiday’s to all users calendars. Following was my approach.
First I thought of looking for a client side solution. Everyone in our organization uses Outlook 2007 and outlook uses a file name outlook.hol for holiday configuration. Following is the format of file, it can be created using a simple text editor and can be distributed by an email or commandline (outlook.exe /hol holidayfilename)
[Country or Description] ###
Event or holiday description, yyyy/mm/dd
Event or holiday description, yyyy/mm/dd
read for more details
Above is not very clean for a large environment, so I was not too happy with this solution and started taking a different approach.
Definitely it would be so much easier doing it with Exchange Management Shell and finally I found my answer.
Here is what's needed for a great solution

• Exchange Management Tools and Outlook 2007 installed on a 32bit machine
• Outlook 2007 to create a PST file
• Export-mailbox
• Import-mailbox

Solution

1. First of all create all events for all holidays in a mailbox Calendar and export it to a PST file or Create a Calendar Item in a PST file with the name “Calendar” and create all events in it.
2. On 32bit a machine where outlook 2007 is installed login with an Exchange Enterprise Admin account and open Exchange Management Shell then run the following
   
   $users=Get-Mailbox –ResultSize Unlimited
   Import-Mailbox $users –PSTFolderPath c:\pstfolder/pstfile.pst –IncludeFolders ‘\Calendar’
   
3. Above will add all items from the PST File Calendar to all users’ calendars.

Now what happens if someone comes to you and says hey there is an event we need to delete from all users’ calendars, simple!!
Get-Mailbox –ResultSize Unlimited | Export-Mailbox –IncludeFolders ‘\Calendar’ –SubjectKeywords “Subject of the appointment” –DeleteContent
Hope this is useful!! Please comment.

Cannot See Disconnected Mailbox Exchange 2007

If disabled or removed mailboxes don’t appear in the console.

Run the following cmdlet from EMS

Clean-Database -Identity SGName\DBName

Public Folder Item Count report

This can help compare public folder replicas on two different servers

Get-PublicFolder –server server1 -Recurse |Get-PublicFolderStatistics |ft Name, ItemCount, FolderPath > pfreport-sever1.txt

Outlook Calendar and Daylight Saving Time

Reoccurring appointments with wrong time

After you have made sure that all your exchange servers have applied correct time settings, clients (workstations) are in sync too and you have a few users complaining about time being incorrect in some of their reoccurring calendar appointments then considering the following may help. Outlook 2010 users may not be effected by this issue but if they are then the following link refers to a Time Zone Data Update Tool for it.

According to the following article Microsoft recommends to use Time Zone Data Update Tool for pre Outlook 2010 clients. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931667

Here is the link to download 32bit tool for pre Outlook 2010 client http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931667

If you don't want to use the tool or if it doesn't fix the issue then manual edit of the appointment is required. This applies to reoccurring appointments.

Go to Outlook > Calendar and open the series of the reoccurring appointment which is not displaying time correctly.

Then click on reoccurrence button and here you will notice that the appointment time is displayed correctly. There are two ways to fix it.

1. Remove reoccurrence save the appointment and apply it again
2. Change the time zone to a different one and save the appointment then apply the correct time zone again and save the appointment.

Both of these options will generate updates and send it to all attendees, fixing the appointment time on their calendars are well.

Disable Send Out of Office auto-replies to External Senders in Exchange 2007

You don’t want users in your organization to send Out of Office Auto-replies to external recipients and also you don’t want the option to appear in Outlook 2007 like shown below

To disable/hide the option Outside My Organization in Out of Office Assistant in Outlook and in OWA use the following in Exchange Management Shell.

Set-Mailbox <mailboxid> -ExternalOofOptions InternalOnly

This can be changed per mailbox, if you want to be applied to all mailboxes there are many ways of approaching it. You can get mailboxes on a server and pipe it with Set-Mailbox with above settings Or the following will apply it on all mailboxes in an exchange organization.

Get-Mailbox –ResultSize Unlimited | Set-Mailbox -ExternalOofOptions InternalOnly

-ResultSize Unlimited is important otherwise it will change the setting for the first 1000 mailboxes.

For more details on Out of Office Assistant refer to the link below.
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/10/06/429115.aspx

Send as permissions disappear – Exchange 2007

You granted send as permissions to an account from Exchange Management Console in exchange 2007 environment and realize that after an hour later the permissions have disappeared, in fact any other explicit permissions that you granted through Active Directory have gone as well. This will also becomes an issue for organizations using BlackBerry.

Above is by design, read this for more details.

To fix the issue:

Remove the account from any of the following group

• Administrators
• Account Operators
• Server Operators
• Print Operators
• Backup Operators
• Domain Admins
• Schema Admins
• Enterprise Admins
• Cert Publishers

If that's not an option then see the work around in the following KB Article.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=907434 

This applies to any version of Microsoft Exchange.

Reset Mailbox Permissions

if a mailbox is being shared between multiple users and for some reason not all folders are visible to all the users. First thing you might want to do is to consider resetting the permissions of the mailbox.

The tool you would use for this purpose is PFDAVAdmin.

• Instead of connecting to public folder on a given exchange server, connect to all mailboxes of the server where the concerned mailbox is.
• Right click the mailbox name and select Propagate folder ACEs
• Check “NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON” and click on OK

even though the level of permission is none “Anonymous Logon” has to be listed in the ACL in order for the folder to be visible to everyone who has permission to the mailbox.

Unable to send emails to a mail enabled Public Folder

When trying to send emails to a mail enabled Public Folder your users receive the following NDR

Delivery has failed to these recipients or distribution lists:

emailaddress@domain.com
There's a problem with the recipient's mailbox. Microsoft Exchange will not try to redeliver this message for you. Please try resending this message, or provide the following diagnostic text to your system administrator.
_____

Sent by Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
Diagnostic information for administrators:

Generating server: htserver.domain.com

emailaddress@domain.com
#550 5.2.0 STOREDRV.Deliver: The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service reported an error. The following information should help identify the cause of this error: "MapiExceptionNotAuthorized:16.18969:E70F0000……

Error: MapiExceptionNotAuthorized makes it apparent that the issue is with permissions.

Check the public folder permissions, use PFDAVAdmin or Microsoft Outlook for it. Make sure that Anonymous has Contributor permission level.