Personal Leave a comment

A new blog backend

The past few months Sander Berkouwer (MVP and admin for dirteam.com) worked hard to get our new blogsite up and running. We had an ancient Telligent (now Zimbra) Community Server, which was limited and didn't provide new and interesting features. So, we decided to move towards WordPress 4. Luckily we could migrate most of our blog posts and comments from Community Server to WordPress. Also, the main link to get to this blog has changed from http://blogs.dirteam.com/blogs/davestork to https://dirteam.com/dave, which

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Exchange, Management, Office 365 One comment

Mail address sieve and Exchange

During a discussion about fighting spam, a coworker mentioned an interesting Gmail feature. As that service doesn't provide aliasses, you can't have a specific mail address alias for your internet services. Some use a different email address for each service they sign up for, a practice which is understandable with some services that (sometimes illegally) opt-in bulk mailings or more nefarious mailings. Whenever a specific alias receives unwanted mails, you can see where it came from and take direct action

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Exchange 2013, Issue, Update Leave a comment

Mail enabled Public Folders on Exchange 2013 CU6 require action for internet mail to be received

So, CU6 is out. It’s easy to overlook the change mentioned within the Exchange 2013 Release Notes. And you might have missed the Exchange Team blog post about all Public Folder changes with CU6. And it might not be relevant for your situation. But I know certain customers rely on mail enabled Public Folders that are able to receive internet mail and are now on Exchange 2013. Sometimes it’s not practical to change those Public Folders to a Shared Mailbox.

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Exchange 2007, Exchange 2010, Exchange 2013, Update Leave a comment

Released: Exchange 2013 CU6, Exchange 2010 SP3 RU7 and Exchange 2007 SP3 RU14

Today Microsoft released the 6th update to Exchange Server 2013, aptly named Cumulative Update 6 (CU6), the seventh update to Exchange Server 2010 SP3; Rollup Update 7 (RU7) and the 14th update to Exchange Server 2007 SP3 named Rollup Update 14 (RU14). They mostly contain smaller security fixes and/or bug fixes or DST (Daylight Saving Time) updates. Having said that, the most eagerly awaited and important fixes in Exchange Server 2013 CU6 include: Hybrid Configuration Wizard fix for Exchange 2013

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Issue, Office 365 11 comments

Fixing Office 365 DirSync account matching issues

Recently I had to fix some issues with DirSync. For some reason (there were some cloud users created before DirSync was enabled) there were duplicate users, because DirSync failed to match the already present cloud user and the corresponding AD (Active Directory) user. There were also accounts that failed to sync and thus failed to sync all attributes properly. If there is already a cloud account and there is need for a synced account, you can create an AD account

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Exchange, Issue, Office 365, Outlook 3 comments

Optimizing the Outlook AutoDiscover process by skipping the root domain query

Updated 8/15/2014: see the bottom of this article for additional information on changed AutoDiscover behavior of Outlook 2013. Consider the following scenario: An Active Directory (AD) domain named equal to the SMTP Suffx, so the mailaddress dmstork@contoso.com in the contoso.com AD domain. No on-premises Exchange, this means that there is no Service Connection Point (SCP) in A. Outlook 2013 (or lower versions from Outlook 2007 up). Exchange Online (or any hosted Exchange for that matter). Additional issue: You’ve got an external

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Exchange, Management, Question of the day Leave a comment

Managing Mailbox quota’s: databases with different settings?

So, a while back I discussed an on-premises Exchange design for a customer. When discussing database distribution in an Exchange 2013 Database Availability Group (DAG), the topic of mailbox quota’s came along. They insisted on having different Database (DB) level quota’s and move mailboxes to other databases when the user requires more storage space. It’s a tactic I have seen before, especially during Exchange 2003 (Enterprise edition) and Exchange 2007. I can understand why organization adopt this practice, it’s easy

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Exchange, Issue Leave a comment

Exchange mail flow not working? Check your (Cisco) firewall!

I’ve come across this issue several times: External mail (or mail between Exchange servers) cannot be delivered, however when you check with telnet the Exchange server(s) are responding. When you check via telnet on the external IP you get something similar: In this case it was a Cisco ASA firewall that had (E)SMTP filtering feature (also called Mailguard) enabled, which is the default setting. Unfortunately, this feature filters very strict and blocks extended commands that are allowed by RFC5321 which

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Exchange, Personal One comment

I am now an Exchange MVP!

For those who weren’t following me on Twitter (or Facebook or whatever), today I received an important mail: Dear Dave Stork, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2014 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Exchange Server technical communities during the past year. After checking headers for spoofing etc. (hey! It’s my expertise after all

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Exchange, Exchange 2013, Migration/Transition Leave a comment

Legacy Public Folders to Exchange 2013 migration tips

A couple of weeks ago I performed a Public Folder migration from Exchange 2007 (aka legacy) towards the modern Public Folders of Exchange 2013. As you may know, the traditional migration method using Public Folder replica's isn't available due to a radical redesign of the Public Folder architecture. Instead of dedicated databases, the hierarchy and data are now stored in mailboxes. The biggest benefit is that Public Folders can now be protected via a Database Availability Group, the downside is

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