I've seen this behaviour in practice before, but I don't think it really clicked with me until Neil May from PostCTI (who was hosting our penultimate Exchange Unplugged event today) told me how pleased he was with it.

This functionality concerns the "missed call notification" feature of Exchange Unified Messaging - as well as the server telling you that you have a new voicemail, it will also tell you when someone has connected to UM but hung up before leaving a message.

In both cases (ie when someone leaves a message, or if they hang up beforehand), if the server can identify their caller ID as belonging to someone in your contacts, you'll see the voicemail or the missed call notification as if it came from the person themselves (it's actually Microsoft Exchange on behalf of <the caller>, but it primarily shows as if it came from the person directly).

So in this case, if I hit "reply" to the notification, it will send an email to the person that was identified as the source of the message. Cool, yes.

What's nice, though, is that if I have my Out of Office message set, and someone calls me then either leaves a message or hangs up, when the notification lands in my Inbox and appears "From" them, their email address will be sent the Out of Office message I've set.

As it happens, I have a contact entry for my own mobile number, in my Outlook contacts folder, but set with my Hotmail email address. When I call my office extension from the mobile, it identifies the contact as the source of the call, and the return address is the Hotmail one, so the Out of Office message I set on my mailbox will be sent to the Hotmail account, since I had associated the mobile number that called me, with that address.

Neil (who spends a lot of time on the road) said this was one of the most unexpectedly cool parts of Exchange UM - customers who call him up and don't leave a message (but who he's already added to his Outlook contacts), will get the Out of Office message as if they'd sent him email. So the next question they ask him is, "How can I get that for myself??"

Seeing this in reality brings the technology alive in a lot of users' eyes.

I'm sure everyone knows that email spam is a growing problem and that there's not a great deal we can do to stop it entirely - initiatives like SenderID can help reduce the volume an organisation receives, and by using smart sender and recipient filtering* and connection filtering to drop inbound connections from known spammers or IP addresses that have been dynamically assigned, you can reduce things still further.

* The basic problem here is that by definition, mail arriving from the internet is anonymous. If you've ever looked at an SMTP conversation between two servers, you'll see they're just a bunch of clear-text commands, with the sending server saying "Hello", then "I've got mail from <...>" and "it's going to <...>" and followed by the body of the message. There's nothing to stop anyone sending mail "From:" any address they choose... and anti-spoofing/anti-spam technology has to try to play catch up by filtering out the cases which don't look legitimate, as well as by filtering content which appears dodgy.

At Microsoft, for example, our IT group filters any email which is coming from the outside and claiming to be "From:" any @microsoft.com address. The thinking is, there is no valid case where anything will ever traverse the internet legitimately coming from a Microsoft address, and enter the Microsoft network from outside via SMTP. So - if you're a spammer trying to mail into Microsoft and pretending to be Bill, don't bother. Your email will be "dropped on the floor".

My own problem is that I have a personal email address which has been the same for about 13 years, and I was generally very careful about giving it out (registering on websites etc), but in recent years have relaxed my policy since the junk mail filters in Hotmail/MSN/Windows Live are generally pretty good and I got very little spam.

Now, some *&"%#!^ spammer has started spoofing mail from my address, and as a result I get a vast number of Non-Delivery Reports, Out of Office messages or notifications that my message has been junked since it looks too spammy. We're talking anything up to 1,000 messages a day, which Hotmail manages to categorise as unwanted and sticks in my Junk folder, and maybe 50 or 60 that make it through to the inbox.

I'm sorry if you've ever had spam from my address - believe me, I don't want to sell you Meds, offer you cheap replica watches, or present a solution for lengthening any anatomical components. Really, I'm quite happy working in IT.

I can't think of what to do. I really don't want to close the account since it's a very short & sharp email address, and I use it for lots of legitimate non-work related things. I can't stop someone pretending to be me, so I'm destined to be spending ages cleaning up my mailbox every week until the spammer gets bored and picks on some other address to spoof instead.

Unless anyone else knows different? Let me know if you have any suggestions which might stop the spammer and yet not cripple my own email address...

A question we get asked a lot is regarding the sizing of voice mail messages in Exchange 2007. If you're not familiar with the built-in voicemail capabilities, Exchange can function as a voice mail system (or Unified Messaging system, really - it's a way of unifying voice and inbound fax messages with email).

What's particularly nice about this is that as far as Exchange is concerned, email and voicemails are just messages. I can respond to a voicemail (such as the one pictured here) by hitting reply, and Outlook (or OWA, or Windows Mobile etc) will create a email response to the "sender" of the voice message, assuming it can work out who they are based on the caller ID that was identified when the message was left.

Lots of people get nervous when thinking about holding voice mail in Exchange, worrying that the message sizes will burden their already overloaded mailboxes. In reality, the size is rarely a big deal - we tend not to get too many voicemails (I probably get less than 10 a week), at least in comparison to the volume of emails received. Add to this the fact that most voicemails are relatively short (and you set a limit on how long the system will let a caller ramble before cutting them off anyway: generally if it's more than 2 minutes long, then it's more of a soliloquy).

There are a few ways of encoding the voice content that Exchange will record as voice mails, and which option you choose might depend on how the users are going to be collecting the voice mails. Outlook, OWA and Windows Mobile can all play Windows Media (WMA) format files, so that's the default - and offers the highest quality for minimum size of message - typically a couple of Kb per second or so (a combination of some overhead for the message, and then the encoding rate of the sample).

The options are to stick with WMA, or if you're looking to interoperate playback of voice content with other telecoms equipment, you may want to encode using GSM 06.10 (an 8-bit compressed format derived from the GSM mobile specifications), or G.711 (a 16-bit PCM non-compressed format, defined as an ITU standard). Both GSM 06.10 and G.711 use the WAV format for representing the sound, and will deliver larger sound files than WMA.

There's a nice explanation of the options over on http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998670.aspx, including this comparative graph of the file sizes:

Basically, don't use G.711 unless you want *really* big voicemails... 

Finally, SP1 will add the option of using Microsoft's RTAudio codec for playback to Office Communicator Phone Edition devices - part of the integration between OCS and Exchange 2007.

The Exchange team gave the green light to build 240.06 of SP1 yesterday!

The download will be available here as soon as they can get the packages deployed to the web. More information on what's in SP1 is on Technet already.

Here's a quick & dirty tool I put together for Outlook to be able to update all the phone numbers of contacts to make them E.164 compliant. It relates back to a post a while back around the challenges of formatting numbers 'correctly', particularly important once you get into using click-to-dial technologies such as Office Communication Server.

The tool itself is basic since it's only really expected that people will run it once, to sort out the numbers of old contacts you might have. It will check all the contacts in a given folder and automatically fix the numbers up, but there are a few caveats...

• It's hard coded for UK numbers beginning +44 ... though the code is pretty easy to get to if you know anything about Outlook forms, and you can modify it at will.
  
• It doesn't back up the contacts before modifying, so you might just want to copy your Contacts folder somewhere else before running, if you're of a nervous disposition. I can verify that it hasn't mangled any of my contacts and nobody in Microsoft who's tried it has reported a problem.
  
• It's not exactly straightforward to install - but if you follow the instructions carefully, you'll be OK.
  
• The document in the ZIP file explaining how to install & run it, is in Word 2007 format (docx). If you still haven't either upgraded or installed the compatibility pack to add OpenXML support to your older version of Office, there's a link in the ZIP file to go straight to the download page.

A final word: this is completely unsupported, supplied "as is" etc. If it does mangle all your contacts up, just revert to your backup copy - and if you didn't take a backup then you've only got yourself to blame.

Harsh but fair I think :)

Enjoy.

The logic converts "from" the format on the left to the format on the right... (_ denotes a space)

Examples