I’ve posted several IMF-related blog postings in the past — here , here , and here . In these posts, I’ve focused mainly on the gateway behavior of the IMF. This is because that’s really what the IMF is, of course… just the gateway behavior. But when...

Every now and then, people ask about one (or all) of the system-related mailboxes on Exchange 2003 servers. There are actually three in particular that people frequently notice and confuse: SystemMailbox{guid} , System Attendant Mailbox , and SMTP (servername...

Note: This information is now available as a public KB article: KB.867624 Some folks on the newsgroups are having difficulty getting their Exchange 2003 clusters upgraded to Exchange 2003 SP1. One example of an error that's been reported: Not able...

Exchange 200x clusters install in two separate phases: In the first phase, the administrator runs SETUP.EXE on the CD. The Exchange binaries are copied from the CD to the local harddrive, some IIS bindings are created, miscellaneous local-to-the-node...

This post is a follow-on post to the SystemMailbox post from last week. Here I’m talking about System Attendant mailbox in Exchange 200x. System Attendant mailbox What is it and what is it used for? Each Exchange 200x server has one (and hopefully...

Over the years, the best practice recommendations on where to place the MS Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MSDTC) resource in Exchange cluster has bounced between two differing views. One camp thought it was unadvisable to place this resource in...

Well, I'm back from vacation and thanks to this morning's time change (at least in the US), very glad to be back into Eastern Standard Time! Warning : Timezone misunderstandings are a huge pet peeve of mine. Ask my friends. :) This is the easy part...

So you've done Exchange 2003 SP1 “Site Consolidation” and you think you're ready to remove your Exchange 5.5 site. All the Public Folders, Mailboxes, DLs, and Custom Recipients have been moved to the central site. All the foreign connectors are relocated...

After posting the Exchange 2007 OPATH intro and How to Upgrade the Filters posts to EHLO over the past few days, one question that's come up enough to warrant another blog post is "Do I really need to upgrade my filters". And the answer is pretty straight...

Prior to Exchange 2003 SP1, if your SMTP protocol virtual server didn't have anywhere to go with a timed-out email, it would drop it in the BadMail directory on your server. This directory could potentially grow and grow without bounds until it filled...

If you're reading this, chances are you're contemplating Exchange 2003 SP1 mixed-mode Site Consolidation. One of the prereqs for moving public folders, mailboxes, distribution lists, or contacts cross-site with this new functionality is that you have...

Raymond has posted several posts about the /3GB switch and about how it affects the Kernel . This is a frequent topic of discussion for highly scaled Exchange 2003 servers due to the recommendation that most servers with >=1gb RAM have this switch...

This post is the third post in a series. Special thanks to Scott Landry for his additions to this post. You may also be interested in the earlier SystemMailbox and System Attendant mailbox posts. SMTP ( servername -{ guid }) mailbox What is it...

Someone sent me email the other day asking about the global configuration of the Intelligent Message Filter (IMF). " Is there anyway to configure the IMF settings at the Admin Group level or something less than global ," they asked. Well, it turns out...

The other day, someone asked me how they could convert the output of an Exchange 2007 property that was being displayed as “Bytes” into KB. They were trying to do all sort of arithmetic (dividing by 1024, etc) to come up with the value and it wasn’t displaying...

In the Do I Really Need to Upgrade my Filters blog post, Several folks posted a question/comment asking about MemberOf. In Exchange 2003, it was possible to build an EAP/AL/GAL/DDG filter that took into account group membership as a criteria for inclusion...

Since I've posted a number of times about OPATH filters for Exchange 2007 and RecipientFilter parameter for EAP/AL/GAL/DDG objects, it's only fair that I get a lot of email asking me questions about how to use it, how to convert old-style LDAP filters...

A while back, I wrote a blog post about verifying that you are ready to remove the source site after undergoing the process of SP1 mixed-mode site consolidation. See here for that intro. Since that post, I've run into a few questions about what to do...

Seems like everyone’s doing it, so I suppose I should too. I’ve added a search option to the blog, using roughly the sample code David Cumps posted a few days ago: http://weblogs.asp.net/cumpsd/archive/2005/01/11/350909.aspx . Updated...

Couple of Exchange tidbits I’ve been saving up for a while. None of them are on my usual topics (Exchange clustering, site consolidations, etc) and they are not large enough individually to warrant their own post, but hopefully they’ll help...

My name is Evan Dodds and I am a Program Manager in the Exchange Datacenter team. I have been with Microsoft for about 7 years, with the first 4+ in Charlotte, NC and now in Redmond, WA. Previous to my Program Manager assignment, I have been a support...

Intelligent Message Filter (IMF) has been a hot topic since it was released to the web last week. I've seen a few questions fly by, and had a few directed at me so let's talk about some of the basics many of you may be wondering. First, let's talk...

I've run into this set of questions about 5 times in the past week alone, so I figure it's worth a blog entry... Exchange setup on a standalone (non-clustered) server creates entries an HTTP protocol entry -- at approximately this location: CN=<theVS#>...

Lots of people are asking lots of questions at the ExchangeNinjas wiki ! Glad to see so much participation both from within the Exchange team and also from the broad Exchange community!! This question struck me as pretty interesting, so I figured I...

Back in my PSS days, it was a common data-gathering/troubleshooting technique to collect "LDP Dumps" (ie - full AD propertyname+value data for a given object) as a way of collecting data for a troubleshooting investigation. If you're a really long-time...