Essential Exchange

Over three years ago, I wrote my most popular (in terms of number of times it has been read) blog post ever: " Exchange Server 2003 and Domain Controllers - A Summary ." Since it was written in January of 2005, Exchange Server 2003 service pack 2 has been released, Windows Server 2003 service...

I just finished installing Exchange Server 2007 on Windows Server 2008 (single server install). It went smooth as silk and I'm as pleased as punch. You have to install the "PowerShell" feature and the "IIS" role, and then start setup. And off she goes... This is what it looks...

Well, it appears that Microsoft has given in. In today's patches, we see KB 948496 , "An update to turn off default SNP features is available for Windows Server 2003-based and Small Business Server 2003-based computers". As I've reported previously, here , here , and here ; there have...

Once the spammers find your domain, which usually only takes a few weeks after it has come online, you'll start seeing lots of error messages being returned to your Exchange Server - for email that was never sent from your server! This is commonly called back scatter, and can be worse than spam itself...

A perennial recommendation to squeeze the utmost in performance from your Exchange 2007 (and Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003...) disk spindles has been to align the partition boundaries of the disks to a 8 KB boundary - since Exchange will always read in 8 KB at a time (or a multiple of that up to a...

In March of 2006, I authored this blog post, Finding Services Using non-System Accounts , with the script being written in VBscript. Two years later, most of my environment is now in PowerShell. So, I've decided to update that post with the PowerShell equivalent. The VBscript version of the utility...

Recently, the question was asked on one of the mailing lists I frequent: why does Exchange Server 2007 make me create all my new distribution groups as universal groups? The answer is just a little bit convoluted. And it really only applies to so-called "enterprise" customers - those with more...

MS08-03 , an "important" February security bulletin designed to prevent Denial of Service attacks against Active Directory and ADAM (Active Directory Application Mode) apparently has some issues with Exchange 2007 in larger organizations. I first heard of this from Pete Kretche, a Systems Administrator...

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. As the Secure part of the name implies, the purpose behind SSL is to secure communications between a client browser (such as Internet Explorer or FireFox) and the server service with which the browser is communicating (which may be web browsing, IMAP, POP-3, etc....

Originally published in January of 2005, my blog post Exchange Server 2003 and Domain Controllers - A Summary has been the most searched-out article on my blog. While, with the release of Exchange Server 2007, the post is beginning to show it's age, the information contained in the article still...