Depending on your situation, you may want to take control of how Exchange’s Autodiscover lookup process works. Specifically, there are a lot of scenarios where Autodiscover will break because the lookup process isn’t properly controlled. In this article, I’ll go over registry settings that will let you control which steps are used and which ones are skipped.…
Shared Mailboxes make it possible to centralize email for a specific group of employees. If you don’t know what a shared mailbox is, think about the “Contact Us” address most web pages have. Or your company’s “Support” mailbox. Exchange implements these very easily through mailbox delegation. Grant users full access to the mailbox in the Admin Portal and the mailbox will appear in Outlook.…
Exchange server maintenance requires some specific steps in 2013+. There is no specific maintenance mode, as in previous versions, but you can complete a few actions to take a server out of production. You will need to drain the SMTP queues on the server, tag the services as unavailable, then disable transport entirely. Each step needs to have some rest time, so that is built into the script.…
How to solve problems with Exchange Autodiscover. Certificate Error issues in particular.
This post may be late in coming, given that most smaller companies have already moved away from on-prem solutions to cloud based services for things like email and file sharing, but I feel like it’s important to stress some of the realities involved in migrating from on-prem to cloud systems. Particularly when migrating to Office 365.…
Exchange Server (And Exchange Online) can be a little confusing at times, particularly when we're dealing with mail routing. Internal mail routes are handled almost automatically (especially if you keep all your Exchange servers in the same AD Site, which I recommend), but how do you get it to route email to mail servers *outside* your organization? This post answers all the questions you might have about how to handle Special Mail Routing cases for Exchange.
This is just a quick little reference post to answer a question that isn’t well covered. Most Exchange admins are familiar with how to set the Virtual Directories in Exchange after a new server is added or a after initial deployment. What’s less clear to most is what those VDirs actually do as far as Exchange’s capabilities are concerned.…
Problems
If you have managed an Exchange server in the past, you’ve probably been required to set things up to allow printers, applications, and other devices the ability to send email through the Exchange server. Most often, the solution to this request is to configure an Anonymous Open Relay connector. The first article I ever wrote on this blog was on that very subject: http://wp.me/pUCB5-b…
As of the release of Outlook 2016, Microsoft has chosen to begin requiring the use of Autodiscover for setting up Outlook clients to communicate with the server. This means that, moving forward, you will need to configure Exchange Autodiscover to get Outlook working properly.
This page contains some information and some links to other posts I’ve written on the subject of Autodiscover.…
In a previous post I explained how you can use a SRV record to resolve certificate issues with Autodiscover when your Internal domain isn’t the same as your Email domain. This time, I’m going to explain how to fix things by making changes to Exchange and Active Directory that will allow things to function normally without having to use a SRV record or any DNS records at all, for that matter.…