In my previous article I presented a script that iterated through all the OUs to export mail enabled users' mail addresses to a CSV file. Active Directory allows you, instead of going through each and evey the OUs, to perform directory wide searches by constructing an LDAP query. LDAP is a pretty complex and powerful query language. The more precise you want to get in your query, the more it gets difficult to control a query.
One of the big problems that Exchange Administrators have is controlling the size of user’s mailboxes. Well never fear help is at hand; with a few simple steps you can have a lot more control.
It is very common for some of your users to express an interest in having their mail delivered to a mailbox that is external to your organization. For example, the user is going to be working away from the office and would like their mail to be delivered to their Hotmail account. Another request might be to have their mail delivered to a different person altogether.
Unsolicited Commercial Email, or spam (as it has become more commonly known) seems to be with us to stay, in much the same way as the junk mail that lands on our doormat each morning. Most of the time we happily delete the daily tide of junk email that arrives in our inbox without giving much thought as to where it might have come from, or how it made its way to us. The fact is that each message must have started its brief life on a server somewhere, and unfortunately spammers rarely go to the trouble of providing their own server hardware, preferring instead to use other people's. Quite possibly yours.
Part of the planning process for deploying Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server in your organization is determining how to administer it. With the introduction of Active Directory, you can separate the administration of servers from the administration of recipients. Understanding this separation is important in deciding how to administer Exchange. In addition, understanding the new administration models is necessary to administer servers and recipients effectively.
The casual nature of email belies the fact that an electronic message is still, in a business context, a legally binding document, and newspaper stories about the legal issues raised by email are becoming increasingly common. While most people can happily dismiss these stories as 'a sign of the times', to the Exchange Administrator they can be a potential source of dismay.
The Recipient Update Service (RUS) is a very important component in your Exchange installation, it is RUS that is responsible for updating address lists and email addresses in your Active Directory.
In Exchange 5.5 you had a GUI interface that let you easily import and export users in the Exchange Administrator utility. Active Directory essentially lets you do the same thing with two utilities: Ldifde and CSVDE. However, both utilities are not that easy to use. Basically you have to unappealing options: either you export the entire directory and start filtering through the many fields available there (and there are a lot!) or you deal with command line switches.
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