Viewing 25 posts - 1 through 25 (of 25 total)
  • Any MS Exchange guru's in the house?
  • m1kea
    Free Member

    Have a really irritating mailbox and public naming issue with our 2003 server and my google foo is now exhausted.

    If you can help, please email me at mikeanton @ hotmail .com

    Cheers

    Cougar
    Full Member

    Is it a secret?

    If you post the issue here, a) we can collaborate and b) it may be useful in the future to someone else with the same issue.

    m1kea
    Free Member

    Cougar

    It isn’t secret but I didn’t want to bore all and sundry. 😀

    Basically we want to amend a selection of mailboxes and public folders so that their display name/alias/sender id/your term of choice is the same.

    I.E instead of receiving mail from “john smith” or “orders”, the message(s) would appear from say, “customer services”.

    Having NO joy in amending simple display names, aliases or even amending x.400 entries.

    Stumped.

    SprocketJockey
    Free Member

    Pretty simple – you set up an AD record for the mailbox you want people to send from.

    You then give all your team full mailbox and “send as” rights to the relevant mailbox.

    You then get them to add it as an additional mailbox in their Outlook profile.

    You make the “From” field visible in their Outlook client – they can then send mail direct from that mailbox with it appearing to come from that address.

    We do exactly the same here and it works pretty well

    The above works for Exchange 2003 – not sure on later versions but would expect the principle to be the same.

    m1kea
    Free Member

    Sprocket

    Thanks for the reply but that’s not what I asked about.

    Sending messages isn’t the problem, it’s changing the displayed ‘sender’ address that is.

    I suspect we might get a result if we restart the IS but that’s not going to be overly popular!

    SprocketJockey
    Free Member

    Eh? The above will do just that. The emails will have the sender address of whichever address is selected in the from field.

    If John Smith sends from ‘Customer Services’ the email will appear in the recipients mailbox as from ‘Customer Services’.

    m1kea
    Free Member

    Agreed.

    We’re trying to change ‘Customer Services’ to display something else and the server just won’t play ball.

    Tweaking our own mailboxes to get the messages to say from “anton, mike” or “Mike’s the best”, makes no sodding difference and trying this on the various public folders is even more of a fail.

    SprocketJockey
    Free Member

    I’m really confused….really not sure what you’re trying to achieve.

    I interpreted your OP as asking how you would send email from a variety of different mailboxes to appear as if it came from one central mailbox.

    m1kea
    Free Member

    No

    we have multiple customer facing mail boxes and mail enabled public folders set up and running. It’s trying to update their ‘sent from’ settings that’s not working.

    So instead of the customer receiving a message from “order.fulfilment@bigcompany.com” we want it to display “customer services”

    enfht
    Free Member

    How long ago did you apply the change?

    Exchange has many different update intervals which can often make it appear that changes haven’t taken effect. Restarting the info store should force the change through.

    Edit: have you also populated the simple display names?

    SprocketJockey
    Free Member

    Ah understand now. You need to change the display name / account name in active directory.

    Once you’ve done then as above you need to restart the information store for the change to take effect and for the relevant mailbox to be renamed.

    Just tested on our system and worked OK.

    Edit – you’ll know it’s worked when the Mailbox name listed in ESM matches the display name.

    m1kea
    Free Member

    Chaps

    We’ve been plissn about with this all day and I’ve lost count of the amount of tests I’ve done!

    Can’t bounce the IS during working hours so we’ve got a reboot in for tomorrow morning; – there’s the obligatory 8000 .net patches to apply from this month’s patch Tuesday 🙄

    For the Public Folders, what do you think is the relevant setting: – Alias or Simple Display Name?

    SprocketJockey
    Free Member

    Pretty sure the simple display name will be sufficient.

    You don’t need to bounce the whole server just the IS service if that helps at all?

    m1kea
    Free Member

    Cheers folks

    The IS will cause enough disruption so we might as well go for the full three finger salute and patch the beasty at the same time.

    PITA if bouncing the IS is the only way to quickly force changes 😕

    enfht
    Free Member

    Careful changing the alias, simple display name should be sufficient.

    monkey_boy
    Free Member

    no help sorry but everytime i see the words MS & Exchange i shudder to my core and feel sick and the nightmares come back to haunt me…

    must have been 2001 and the exchange 5.5 server registry got corrupt and i/we lost over 200 mailboxes as the backups messed up….

    never touched it since…. but i hear it has moved on somewhat!

    good luck hope you get it sorted! 8)

    ps- if your ever really in the sh*t give ‘experts exchange’ a go, saved my life numerous times over the years (but you’ve prob heard of it)

    m1kea
    Free Member

    Morning all

    reboot and MS patching made no difference.

    Restarting the IS after one simple display name change DID generate a change. However subsequent tests and IS restarts haven’t done anything. 🙁

    Monkey boy

    Used to use EE when you could check their answers in Google cache 😉 They want £13 a month now!

    SprocketJockey
    Free Member

    You could perhaps try renaming the AD profile completely as well as updating the simple display name? Again you’d need to restart the Information Store service.

    Other than that, I’m stumped too. I tested it here yesterday (Exchange 2003) and it worked fine.

    chipsngravy
    Free Member

    My own solution the Exchange woes. Bin it and migrate to Google Apps.

    3months in:
    Money saved
    Happier work force
    No spam
    No more Microsoft.

    mossimus
    Free Member

    Just to clarify you only need to change the sent from name, you are not worried about the actual return address?

    Presuming so then as above simply changing the Display Name and restarting the service is all you need to do.

    Having NO joy in amending simple display names, aliases or even amending x.400 entries

    Presumably you tried all this on a test system? How about starting again with fresh test environment and amending just the display name as suggested above. If that does not work then you have issues.

    Edit: If no joy I might also be tempted to delete the local mail profile, shouldn’t really matter but……..

    domtastic
    Free Member

    You’ll need to update the Global Address List, then if you’re testing internally make sure that you’ve downloaded the latest version

    hot_fiat
    Full Member

    Bin it and migrate to Google Apps

    Eww GAPE (shudder) I can send you to see two massive customers of mine who’ve done the google thing and really regret it. Plus having all of your corporate communications and documentation trawled, sorted, filed and indexed neatly for the NSA your American competitors to view advertising purposes doesn’t sound healthy to me.

    This sounds like an AD attribute issue. There’s at least three attributes at play here name, Name and displayName, but yer probably going to have to mangle things like distinguishedName and as a result the CN. This is trickier than you’d imagine as you’re not left with much to bind to in a vb script. Thankfully powershell is a little more intelligent than that. I’m not a migration/exchange bod anymore, but I know plenty of friendly people who are. Get yourself over to here or here, register and ask your question. We’re a friendly bunch and you don’t even need to own any of our stuff to join in.

    You might also like powergui though the proper version is no longer free.

    m1kea
    Free Member

    Chaps

    responses in no particular order

    No test box to play with, hence limited testing on live server 😐

    “Just to clarify you only need to change the sent from name, you are not worried about the actual return address?” – YEP

    Migrate to the cloud? Hmm I don’t think so. Plus we’re allegedly going to be integrating with the mothership parent company at some point so this will either go away or become someone else’s problem!

    I concur about this likely to be a AD issue but scooting through adsiedit and ADexplorer for pattern matches only really flagged up x.400 entries which is unlikely. Plus we’re also looking at mail enable Public Folders as well.

    I’ll look at hot_fiat’s links.

    enfht
    Free Member

    OK, what have you changed so far and what’s your domain functional level?

    Is this a standalone single 2003 machine?

    Does your admin account have all necessary exchange/domain group membership, i.e. have you made similar changes in the past?

    m1kea
    Free Member

    Just to resurrect this and to thank all who’ve commented.

    I think we can put this to bed now as we have enough of a fudge in place solution.

    Amending the mailbox Display Name(s)has been OK with IS restarts though we still haven’t had any joy getting Public Folders to update.

    We can live with this so case closed 🙂

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