exchange email policy

Purpose of a Recipient Policy in Exchange 2003

Exchange Server 2003 gives every mailbox-enabled user a default SMTP email address in the format: logonName @ ourdom.com. The point of a Recipient Policy is to tell Exchange 2003 how to define extra email addresses for users or groups. Take as an example, a company with a main email address of ourdom.com. Suppose that this company bought a second company called planBcomp.net. Wouldn't it be useful if the planBcomp.net people could receive email addressed to accounts in both domains? No problem, use Exchange 2003 to create a Recipient Policy which adds a secondary SMTP address to their email settings.

Creating a Recipient Policy

Recipient Policies are decidedly tricky to configure. The two secrets are, make sure you have a filter, and remember to right click, then 'Apply this policy now'.

Creating the Recipient Policy is the easy part. Just navigate to the Recipient Policies folder, right click then select: New. Once the new policy arrives, select the E-mail Addresses tab, click New and then SMTP address. Example @ourdom.com

Consider an email address: guyt@ourdom.com. Here is an example of the logic that Exchange 2003 uses to define the left part of the email address. Exchange takes a user account alias, guyt in our example, the recipient policy then calculates the left side of the @, e.g. guyt@. and adds it to the domain name ourdom.com.

As I mentioned earlier, Exchange set the left part of the email address = logonName. So you may wish to change this format with one or more of these clever variables. For example, to build the displayName from the first 3 letters of the firstname added to the first 4 letters of the last name. The secret of custom SMTP addresses is to control this family of % variables:

%g = givenName.
%s = sn (Last name).
%4s = means first four letters of sn.
%d = displayname.
%m = Exchange alias.

Example: %3g.%4s@ourdom.com translates to = guy.thom@ourdom.com

Where can you see these actual email addresses? Open Active Directory Users and Computers, select the user, properties tab and the Exchange e-mail tab.

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