Author: James

After migrating to Exchange 2010 from 2003 we discovered that all the external contacts from the Global Address List (GAL) migrated ok but they all had an extra email assigned with our servers domain.

For example: trevor@citycorp.com would have an extra smtp address attached of trevor@mydomain.com

In addition any new contacts also had the additional email attached.

Which isn’t ideal so we looked into changing it and came up with a powershell script that would delete the extra emails and prevent them being added again:

####
# Input variables
####
$domains = @(“*@mydomain.com“)
$ou = “myactivedirectorydomain”

####
# Removing internal domains from contacts
####
$domains | foreach {
$domain = $_;
write-host “Preparing for removal of addresses with domain name:” $domain
$Contacts = Get-MailContact -OrganizationalUnit $ou -Filter {
                EmailAddresses -like $domain -and name -notlike “ExchangeUM*”
            } -ResultSize unlimited -IgnoreDefaultScope
$Contacts | foreach {      
    $contact = $_;
    $email = $contact.emailaddresses;
    #write-host “1. ” $contact
    #write-host “2. ” $contact.name
    #write-host “3. ” $email
    #write-host “4. ” $contact.identity
    $email | foreach {
        if ($_.smtpaddress -like $domain)
            {
                $address = $_.smtpaddress;
                write-host “[*] Removing address” $address “from Contact” $contact.name;
                Set-Mailcontact -Identity $contact.identity -EmailAddresses @{Remove=$address};

            }

    }
}
}
####
# Setting up email address policy to disabled for all contacts
####
write-host “Preparing all contacts for disabling email address policy”
$Contacts = Get-MailContact -OrganizationalUnit $ou -Filter {
                EmailAddresses -like $domain -and name -notlike “ExchangeUM*”
            } -ResultSize unlimited -IgnoreDefaultScope | Where {$_.EmailAddressPolicyEnabled  -eq $true}
$Contacts | foreach {
    $contact = $_;
    write-host “[*] Setting up email address policy to disabled for” $contact.name
    $contact | set-mailcontact -emailaddresspolicyenabled $false
}

The first part of the script cycles through the contacts deleting the emails with the domain set in the $domains variable – replace ‘mydomain.com’ with your own domain and change the $ou to the correct active directory domain and out e.g. adroot.mydomain.com

The second part changes the default email policy which is what causes the extra smtp addresses to be added.

If you add new contacts via console then you do not need to run this again as you would not apply the default email policy but if you are adding contacts using an older script you may experience this problem and would therefore have to run again – perhaps on a scheduled basis.

Nice one Microsoft {:-|

We like to keep our servers up to date so after testing in our VM environment we went ahead and installed the latest update rollup for Exchange server 2010 from Microsoft.

Everything went smoothly but afterwards we soon realised that no email was going out – no bounceback no message nothing, it just dissappeard!

It turned out to be a problem with out Disclaimer. Like most companies we add a disclaimer to every email sent outside the organisation. Because of this additional step on the server all these outgoing emails were seen as ‘poisoned’ and were dropped.

Obviously, this is something rather difficult to test for and after looking on a number of forums many Microsoft customers had suffered a similar fate.

Microsoft were looking into it and would be providing an update but in the meantime we had to turn off our disclaimer adding and ask out users to add them manually for now.

After opening a support call with Microsoft it transpired that a Hotfix was available. We downloaded, tested and rolled it out and disclaimers are now working. Please bear in mind that if you need to install a rollup in the future this Hotfix has to be uninstalled before proceeding.

In other words Microsoft won’t release a new update intil the next rollup despite the severity and will only supply a hotfix on request. Not very impressive.

Here is the relevant article and details of hwo to obtain the hotfix: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2859596/en-gb