This time I have been asked to explain how Advanced Queuing behaves -- how retries work and when we decide to reroute mail. Since I’ve had plenty of questions on this in the past, buckle your seatbelts – this one is going to be interesting. Functions of Queuing: Categorize messages – Figure...

What are badmails? Badmails are mail that the Exchange server cannot deliver or NDR (non-delivery report). A common source of badmails comes from the unsuccessful attempt to deliver an DSN (delivery status notifiction. NDR is a form of DSN). We keep badmails around primarily for diagnostics. Badmails...

The "Centro" Product team is looking to you to help test the Beta of "Centro". "Centro" is the code name for a new Microsoft infrastructure solution that will help midsize businesses with less than 250 PCs in their environment. Centro will bring together key server products for midsize businesses, including...

At Tech-Ed, we gave away about a bajillion (give or take a few) of buttons with various phrases on them, like "OWA ROX" or "I GOT UM": If you'd like to buy any of your own, they're up on our cafepress store , in both button and magnet form. At Tech-Ed, ten lucky customers walked away with...

I don't post blogs very often - I tend not to have much to say that isn't random and am rather focused on the product, work in general, or trying to battle traffic to get home. But a comment in this recent blog post was mentioned to me. To help you stress and size your deployments with The Exchange...

There is a lot of emphasis on Exchange database backups. As a result most Exchange administrators plan regular backups with considerations for their specific environment. In the process of developing a backup solution, Exchange administrators have to answer multitude of questions: Shall I protect my...

The Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant suite of tools was developed to help customers and Customer Service and Support (CSS) isolate issues faster. ExTRA is integrated into the toolbox in Exchange Server 2007 and is available directly from the Exchange Management Console. Very often, running ExTRA is...

A friend called me at home recently… he had bad Exchange issues and it all sounded very confusing. I pointed him to our data collection tools, had him run it and send me the .CAB file. After looking it all over I was able to figure out the problem pretty quickly. It can be challenging at times to hunt...

With all the various public folder tools out there, it can be difficult to remember what tool works with what version of Exchange, and what the tool can be used for. Here's a summary. pfadmin 1.3 Available at: ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/pss/tools/Exchange%20Support%20Tools/PFAdmin/ Used for: imports, or...

The Outlook team is investigating making some improvements to this scenario, and they would like to see real-world examples from any customer who has customized the templates. If you are willing, please send us the file as per the instructions below. Note: This file does not contain any personal data...

Do you want to be on a team that is helping to shape the future of the next generation email messaging and collaboration applications? Do you have great writing skills? Are you passionate about writing technical documentation and pride yourself on delivering the best content possible? The Exchange...

Over the years that OWA has been developed we’ve kept our focus on improving user productivity through supporting many of the timesaving features present in Outlook and other Windows applications. Unfortunately many users don’t realize that these features are available in OWA since features like hot...

<edit 11/12/09 10:48pm: Added some additional information, links, etc.> On November 9 th , many of our web properties were updated with new content and information to coincide with the general availability of Exchange 2010. With all the new information out there, where do you start? What should...

Move mailbox in Exchange 2003 has significant improvements related to reliability and performance.  Previously, to run multiple instances of mailbox moves, you would have to open up multiple MMC consoles and initiate multiple moves, or write a script to do it and run it multiple times simultaneously...

Exchange Server can benefit from having basic disk partitions track-aligned. Diskpar.exe is used for aligning a partition at the storage level, which, if used to create the partition, can have a significant positive performance impact on the storage and is highly recommended. Before I go into the details...

I was asked the following question recently: What are the minimum permissions necessary I need to grant a user in order for that user to be able to access the data in another user’s mailbox? Automatically I referenced following article 821897 that states Send As and Receive As permissions are necessary...

Few weeks ago, we had something quite interesting happen: On 12/4/04 we went over 1,000,000 hits on the Exchange Team blog site. Those are cumulative hits, since the first post back in February 2004 when KC boldly broke the ice after creating the Exchange blog site. Because of that and the total number...

Hi, I’ve hopefully met many of you at TechEd, IT Forum, or another Exchange community event – but if not, I hope to meet you there soon and I’ll introduce myself now to get it out of the way. I’m the General Manager of the Exchange product team. I’ve been a member of the Exchange team for 4 years...

Continuing our previous post on Exchange 2007 Setup , this blog post goes into explanation of what are different log files that are created by Exchange setup and how to use them to troubleshoot setup issues. Prerequisite failures If you fail a prerequisite condition, then the text will be logged to the...

Zoe posted today about a hiring event for SDETs for Exchange. See the jobsblog for more information .

Introduction Customers who are considering Unified Messaging (UM) will at some stage ask the question: "How Many Exchange 2007 Servers running the UM role will I need to support my users?". The short answer to the question is: "That depends". This blog post tries to illustrate the factors on which...

In this blog post, which is a continuation of previous post on the subject of WebReady document viewing , I'll go over how to customize the settings for attachments when using Exchange Server 2007 Outlook Web Access. OWA 2007 allows you to specify which file and MIME types to allow, block, and force...

As our Limerick contest ended close to 2 weeks now, we figured we should announce our winners. Without further ado, here they are! 1 st prize winner (will receive an Exchange branded Zune) There once was a gal with FiveFive Her mail system was barely alive She sat at her...

Active/Passive configurations are enforced in clusters with more than two nodes (more than two Exchange nodes in Exchange 2003). This means that the scaling and monitoring limitations required for two-node Active/Active do not apply to clusters with more than two nodes. In clusters with more than two...

Tired of switching windows between Exchange System Manager, Event Viewer, Active Directory Users and Computers and whatever else you use to manage your Exchange environment? Just slap them all in one custom MMC window: Start by opening a blank MMC Console (Start – Run – type...