Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with exchange and email

I am accessing my work email using gmail, and I need help satisfying my company's backup requirements. Help?

kdern — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:47:16 -0800

I am accessing my work email using gmail, and I need help satisfying my company's backup requirements. Help? We use Exchange at work (MS Exchange 2007), and I am on a mac. I don't like Entourage, so I have been accessing my email via POP on a gmail account. I am very happy with this setup.

The problem is that since it's POP, emails that I send from gmail are not synced back to the Exchange server, which means they are not backed up with all the other company emails. If I want to continue using gmail, I have to figure out a way to get my outgoing emails backed up.

Gmail cannot fetch emails via IMAP, only POP, so that's not an option.

I considered OSX Mail, Entourage and Thunderbird, but I find Gmail to be far superior.

The only option I've thought of is this... to have all my outgoing emails automatically bcc'ed to an internal email address, which we would set up just for this purpose. Then all my outgoing emails would be backed up. I haven't been able to figure out how to do this in gmail.

Can anyone help? Please don't make me use Entourage!

m.exchangemail.com

benzenedream — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:35:08 -0800

Seeking a lightweight web interface to Exchange 2003 server. Need something more usable than OMA, but more smartphone-friendly than Outlook Web Access. We don't allow work email to be cached on non-work devices for legal reasons. I'd like to be able to log in to webmail but find OWA rather clunky on a smartphone browser; OMA provides a bare-bones interface that's intended for ActiveSync rather than actual humans. Has anyone cobbled together a reasonable solution? I guess I'm looking for something like the mobile gmail page for Outlook. We won't be upgrading to Exchange 2007 for a while so its features are not an option.

Backup Outlook from Exchange?

Joleta — Tue, 12 May 2009 07:43:36 -0800

How can I back up my Outlook 2003 files kept on an exchange server to a thumb drive? I know how to find and back up .pst files on my personal computer. Is there any way I can make a personal backup of my Outlook e-mail, contacts, etc. when they're stored on an exchange server? I don't want to lose this information if I should, say, no longer have access to my work e-mail for some reason.

Migrated MAPI Permissions?

Leud — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:30:02 -0800

Exchange - How does it handle Outlook MAPI permissions when migrating users from one domain to another? So the background is we've got two domains, Domain A and Domain B. Environments are all windows server 2003, Exchange 2003.

Currently users are on Domain A and have mailboxes there, we are migrating users to Domain B, disabling the Domain A account but leaving the mailboxes on Domain A. (This is not going to change for some time).

The accounts are moved over with sIDHistory maintained so NTFS permissions etc all work, the Domain A Mailbox permissions are set with the Domain B accounts as full access and associated external accounts.

My question is how do MAPI permissions work/carry over? If Bob Smith on Domain A has added Joe Bloggs using MAPI permissions to their outlook inbox, will this work once Joe Bloggs has been moved to Domain B?

The MAPI permissions are seperate from AD and I suspect don't check for sidhistory? Looking for confirmation on this.

Thanks,

FW: FW: FW: FW: RE: Check this out! LOL

Liver — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:27:58 -0800

Should I try to take back our Exchange server from the inappropriate uses? I'm an IT worker in a small local government IT shop. We have roughly 250 - 300 users. Recently I've been taking a more active roll in the management of our spam firewall and Exchange server, and have made some interesting observations.

I am not shocked, but I am thoroughly appalled at the amount of personal email that travels through our server. It turns out that the top users of email resources aren't the important decision-makers and managers, but the lowest level employees with very little legitimate work use for email. For example, the #1 email user in our entire organization is a receptionist that answers phones for the tax department. What are these emails? Albino moose pictures, prayer forwards, angel pictures, chain forward, inspirational videos, and the like.

This is just one person, but there are a hundred more out there that either through ignorance of apathy are misusing the government email server as their own personal email provider.

Part of the problem, I think, is that most of these people are not computer & internet savvy. Their email address here is the first one they've ever had, and they have zero concept of what is and isn't appropriate email. To them, there is just EMAIL. Dancing baby forwards are just as legitimate as a message from their boss, or a member of the public seeking help.

As I see it I have a few options.

1) Do nothing. Accept that people are using county resources for their personal business and try to minimize the impact on legitimate users. This is the easy way out, and the way we got into this situation to begin with.

2) Bring the hammer down. Get aggressive with what comes and goes. Block all images by default. Train spam filters to block inappropriate emails. Tighten disk quotas to noose-like levels on "regular" users. Tell users to get hotmail/gmail/yahoo accounts for personal use. Expect resistance.

3) Something in between.

I'm especially interested in hearing from anyone who may have come into a poorly managed IT department and had to affect changes to both the technology and the culture side of problems similar to this.

What would migrating an Outlook Exchange email system with Google's business Gmail?

gttommy — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:43:43 -0800

What would migrating an Outlook Exchange email system with Google's business Gmail? Google's Gmail for business seems like it has some potential and I am in the process of possibly converting the company!

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/messaging.html

Any advice on what could be involved such as drawbacks or implementation process or method will be useful.

Thanks mefi.

mangled email signature...

dance — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 13:59:58 -0800

Why would a PNG, sent as part of an email signature, look compressed and distorted and generally horrible when included again in the recipient´s reply? This is through MS Exchange but I think it´s more than one Exchange. Googling for Outlook´s image compression ´feature´ doesn´t return anything useful. I can send a sample mail to anyone who´s interested in helping. Of course I could make a GIF, but I wanted PNG, damnit! ;-)

Thanks!

Switching to Gmail for work email?

Cool Papa Bell — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:02:56 -0800

Have you used Gmail to handle work email? Were there any pitfalls? My previous places of business used Exchange servers, so at the office I'd use Outlook and then use the Exchange Web interface for home email. This was all well and good.

My current employer does not use Exchange, and its Web client is circa 1996 atrocious. While we can use Outlook at work, I've never liked the search functions, and without Exchange handling Calendars and Tasks, there's no *need* to use Outlook. As a result, I use Thunderbird with IMAP at work and at home.

I'm starting to dislike Thunderbird, for various reasons. It does wacky things with email forwards, for example. I've been thinking to just ditch it all and grab the work email to Gmail using POP3, and use Gmail as The One Interface to Rule Them All.

What are the common pitfalls I'm not seeing?

Will a LG Env2 handle my email load?

bigcheesegump — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 14:23:53 -0800

Will my LG Env2 (LG VX 9100) be able to handle my e-mail needs? I have come upon a situation where my job requires me to be accessible via email essentially 24/7. I have looked at Blackberry and other smart phone options but am pretty happy with my LG Env2 with Verizon Wireless.

I have looked into the mobile email and have been looking at the RemoSync application which promises to enable Microsoft Exchange email access on certain Verizon phones (mine included).

Does anyone have any experience (positive/negative) with using the Env2 with an Exchange server with RemoSync?

Importing Exchange users into distribution list

starscream — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:30:42 -0800

I need to create a distribution list that includes all 750 people in my company, but I don't want to have to type in each name manually. I have all the user display names in notepad and am looking for a way to import these names. Difficulty: this needs to be a distribution list in Exchange, not simply in my Outlook. Assuming that I'm the domain/exchange admin, is there an easy way for me to create a distribution list in Exchange and populate it with display names that I have in a text file or in Excel? I can also get the e-mail addresses if need be.

Need Recommendations for a Hosted Exchange Provider for one.

ajr — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 10:24:21 -0800

Any recommendations for a reliable Exchange 2007 service provider for one person? I just need a single account to use with Outlook and an iPhone. 1and1.com is my current provider. Apart from being slow, they have had several service outages on "my" server recently. I don't mind paying more for fast and reliable service. Prior posts (tangentially related to this question) have suggested Apptix, but I sent a request for service three days ago that has not been responded to yet. Not a good sign.

How much for Exchange for 500-800 users?

jimjam — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:29:12 -0800

MS Exchange railroad: How much does it really cost for an in-house Microsoft Exchange system? The linux/imap/smtp email system at our company sucks (500-800 users) and one of our systems admins wants to deploy Microsoft Exchange (2003 probably) to solve this.

The problem is, the costs and complexity of the proposed Exchange system are spiraling out of control. It went from one physical server hosting Exchange to now 5 or 6 physical servers, each running various components, and talk of server CALs and client CALs. Exchange 2007 will be even more expensive apparently, if/when we upgrade to that.

We're now talking $100k of hardware, and $200-300k of cash thrown at Microsoft, just to get email for several hundred people. (the previous system running on linux was 'cheap', as-in no software license fees, and just a couple servers)

Looking at Microsoft's site, I can't make heads or tails of how this system -really- should be built out (server-wise), and what the actual license costs will be. Scanning the web, I can't find any 'I built Exchange this way for this many people and it cost this much' type of info.

Unfortunately the company brass has already tanked the idea of Google Apps or hosted Exchange, due to security concerns, so I'm actually just looking to find out how much $$ and how complex this Exchange system will be.

I know admin in question is a serious Microsoft zealot, and will just keep on piling on the hardware/software expenses, in order to build a small empire of systems under her control. Plus $500k for email seems pretty extravagant to me personally, and the proposed system is -incredibly- complex. If this admin leaves after setting this all up, we're screwed.

Anyone have any ideas on or pointers on this?

Microsoft Exchange Server for Epsilon Semi-Morons?

loquacious — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:39:04 -0800

How do I set up Microsoft Exchange (or Outlook) Server for a small office? I'm providing basic knuckle-dragger tech support for a small office, and one of the things they want to implement and that I want to provide eventually is an Exchange or Outlook server.

Where do I begin? What should I watch out for? What about security issues?

I will be using Server 2003 and a primarily XP client base.

Any central signature managment tools for MS Exchange?

bartleby — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:33:56 -0800

ExchangeFilter: any centralized signature/logo/disclaimer management tools you can recommend? I'd rather not go desk to desk to add a logo. OK, so I asked basically the same question two years ago; I ended up going from workstation to workstation adding a disclaimer to 40 people's signatures in Outlook. (There's a policy that no one is allowed to modify their own signature, so any changes have to be made by IT, which is me.) That involves travelling to 5 different sites, and I'd rather not do it again.

But there's a request in the air to add a logo or some other doodads to the company email signatures. Since my question was asked the first time, perhaps some advancements have been made.
Can this be done by:
1) a new Active Directory feature in Server 2008?
2) a new feature in Exchange 2007?
[we're running Server/Ex 2003 now]
3) if not, and this is still a 3rd-party-software solution, can you recommend any products? Exclaimer seems to come up a lot - any reviews?

Alternatives to Exchange?

keep it tight — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:40:45 -0800

Has anyone in the hive had experience with Kerio Mail Server?

Day of the Deleted Message part 17

nowonmai — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:37:58 -0800

I have a long-winded question about deleting zombie messages from Apple's mail.app. I am trying to get rid of some unwanted email on my Mac, and finding it surprisingly difficult.

Mac OSX 10.4, downloading email from a Microsoft exchange server by POP3 because that's what the IT guys said to do.

Once a week or so I get an email that's really intended for somebody else with the same name as me in the same organization. The emails have 300-odd addresses in the the "To:" line, including a dozen or so distribution lists, to one of which I must have been mistakenly added. I have no idea how to get myself off these lists, so that is unfortunately not the answer.

Anyway, Mail.app just stalls and has to be force-quit when trying to download these messages. I then log into webmail, delete the offending message, and everything's OK again.

Except there are a whole bunch of these messages on my computer now, and try as I might I can not delete them. They just respawn. If I move them to a folder, they respawn in my inbox and now I have more copies. I have tried the rebuild mailbox command. I have tried deleting .emlx files that contain these messages - this deletes the contents of the messages, but the headers seem to stay in the system somewhere, and now my inbox is full of disembodied headers.

Does anybody have any ideas what else I can do? Are there other files I can delete without borking up all the rest of my mail? (My saved mail from my boss and colleagues is important, and there's many megabytes of it). Can I edit some file somewhere by hand to remove database lines containing a certain string? Can I export and reimport my messages in a way that will allow me to strip out the dodgy ones? Is there some Voodoo trick that might help? I have googled extensively, but the universal answer seems to be "rebuild mailbox", which just doesn't help.

Will my company support corporate email on the iPhone?

mullacc — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 12:55:36 -0800

Please help me figure out if my IT department will support corporate email on the iPhone. I asked IT already, but I don't understand their response. This is likely my fault for asking an ill-formed question. Can someone translate this for me? Here is the exchange:

Q: "...do we support Exchange Activesync for mobile email on non-Blackberry devices (like the Samsung Blackjack)? I ask because Apple announced yesterday that the iPhone will be supporting Activesync in June and I’m wondering if CompanyX employees will have their iPhones supported."

A: "We do not support the IMAP mail protocol at CompanyX, so ActiveSync will not work. Currently, our infrastructure only supports Blackberry Enterprise Server or Good Mobile Messaging for mobile devices."

My understanding of this stuff is pretty much limited to this slide shown during the Apple press conference yesterday. That slide gave me some hope that the iPhone would plug right into our infrastructure the way Windows Mobile devices do.

The part that really confuses me is the reference to IMAP--do we need an IMAP server to run Activesync? This blog post, for example, makes me think that is not the case.

I'm not trying to fight IT over this issue, I'm just trying to understand their explanation.

How popular is my newsletter?

bda1972 — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:34:23 -0800

Exchange 2003 SP2: Is there any way to tell how many users read a particular email or opened an attachment in that email? My boss sends out a monthly newsletter (as an attachment) to our entire organization of about 800 users. He asked me to find out how many staffers actually read the email or open the attachment. I told him I don't think it's possible, at least not without a third-party tool. Even if you could, the read count wouldn't be accurate because a lot of users would click on and off the email (marking it as read) before deleting it without actually reading it. Either way, I thought I'd ask the hive mind for confirmation before reporting back to him with a final answer.

I doubt it matters but we use a mix of Outlook 2003 and 2007 on Windows XP SP2.

Possible to implement user photos in MS Outlook/Exchange?

psmealey — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:14:03 -0800

Is it possible to create a tab/form in the Microsoft Outlook properties window where you can post a user's picture? Just doing some research for my company, the guys in IT say it's not possible, but I could have sworn that I had seen it done at another company. The idea is that when you get a mail from someone, you double-click their name, the properties box pups up and you get to click to their picture. Is this something that can be done with whatever SDK is available with Microsoft Outlook 2003 (v11... not sure what version of Exchange we're running), or am I just better building something on the intranet that does the same thing?

Anyone with experiance in making MS Exchange work with SpamAssassin without having a Linux Box on hand?

TrueVox — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 13:39:07 -0800

I work at a small company with an Exchange server. We need OK spam protection. In an effort to move them to a more FOSS workcycle, I'm advocating SpamAssassin. Basically, I need it to work in our Windows Environment. We currently run NO Linux boxes, and while we're not at all against virtualization (in fact I'm pushing for us to get a copy of VMWare Workstation for our beefy new server), it needs to be simple. I tried downloading the Embeded version of Damn Small Linux, but it is a pain to get it so it can save (as near as I can tell), so that's a no go. Any other ideas? I'd run it on Windows but the walk through confuses me (even the easy one). Again, I'm not against Linux, but it has to be easy (preferably drop in). Has anyone used Spam Vigilante? Is it simple (and by simple, I mean assume I'm an idiot :D)? Oh, and does it work with Exchange (I don't see it mentioned but maybe I'm blind)?

Ok, thanks a lot in advance! I really appricate your feedback!

How can I open up an Exchange folder?

taumeson — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 10:25:52 -0800

Are there any tools out there that will enable me to open an arbitrary user's Inbox on our Microsoft Exchange server? I've got domain admin privileges and I caught somebody with an inappropriate email. The scuttlebutt is that this is not his first time, so I wanted to do some digging to see if this is endemic or a one time thing. I've got the authority to do so, as well.

How Do I get Outlooks out of office assistant to work for e-mails received from the internet?

ijoyner — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 13:00:55 -0800

Our organization's MS Outlook out of office assistant is not working for e-mails received from outside the organization. Why is this and is there a way to fix it? We use Exchange Server 03 on Server 03 with clients using Outlook 03. I can turn the out of office assistant on, and it works for inter-office e-mail just not e-mails coming in from the outside internet.

Teach my PC some PDA-cleverness...

blue_wardrobe — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 13:52:26 -0800

How does my Windows Mobile PDA communicate with our office Exchange Server successfully without using a VPN, when I have to use a VPN with Microsoft Outlook to get at it? (And then are there any PC-based programs that can use the same technique as the PDA?)

Sending mail from Linux to Exchange

tommasz — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 06:29:12 -0800

I have a Linux box (Ubuntu Edgy) that I would like to be able to send mail to an Exchange server. It also needs to send/receive locally. Which MTA will actually allow me to do this and are directions for configuring it available? I've found lots of vague references but very little "program X will do this and here's how" kind of stuff.

Switching from POP email to Exchange

SteveInMaine — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 01:35:44 -0800

We're making the switch from POP mail to hosted Exchange mail, and it isn't as much fun as it should be. Our pop mail host had become undependable over time. Along with switching providers, we decided to switch to a hosted Exchange solution. I figured mail is mail, so I probably didn't do as much upfront legwork prior to signing up for the new service (with Mi8) as I should have. Now I'm knee deep in making the transition from POP to Exchange work and am having difficulty getting off the line with it.

The first challenge is making it work with Mozilla Thunderbird. I realize Exchange is made to work with Outlook, but one of the owners of our company likes and uses Thunderbird, so I need to make the effort. It doesn't help that he's out of town until next week, so it's dangerous for me to make an arbitrary switch to Outlook on his PC. I've managed to configure Tbird to retrieve incoming mail, but haven't cracked the outgoing settings. Most of what I've found via web search says you need to use a separate SMTP server for outgoing mail if you're using Thunderbird, but I need to verify this. Mi8's response is they only support Outlook, and they're not even willing to point me to other resources. I wish I had known that before signing on with them.

The second problem I'm faced with is understanding a basic concept of Exchange. Using Outlook with POP you are given the option to leave messages on the server or automatically clear them after X days. To simplify matters, all of our users' Outlook settings delete messages after 5 days and the users archive the inbox on their own. As everybody here lives in email and needs to keep old messages, they've ended up with archives going back a few years resulting in many large (+1gb) PST files, so keeping messages on the server for any length of time isn't practical (or economical). I cannot find IMAP settings in Outlook that will automatically delete messages from the server. Is the assumption with exchange that you use the server to store all of your messages, or that you will manually archive them off? Also, Mi8 provides software called fastinstall that creates Outlook settings to connect with their servers. Unfortunately, it accomplishes this by setting up a new profile in Outlook that doesn’t let you mingle your old mail with the new. If I manually set up the Outlook clients, is there a reason I can’t just add the Exchange settings as a new email account in the existing POP profile?

And finally, does anybody have any good public web resources for Exchange administrators?