Fix those IMCEAEX NDRs

I had a customer migrate some mailboxes a few weeks ago, and they’re now just getting some NDRs.  Here’s a sample NDR:

imceaex-1

To fix this, you can take the NDR that you receive, copy/paste it into this function, and then take the resultant decoded x500 address and add it back to the proxyAddress array for the recipient.… [ Continue reading ]

Updates to Office 365 Proxy PAC Generator

I wrote the original Proxy PAC tool for a customer almost a year ago, and since have added a lot of new functionality.  Rather than updating my previous blog posts about it, I thought I would start a fresh thread.  If you want some background on how Proxy PAC files work and how to distribute them to your users via GPO or WPAD, I would suggest taking a look at my posts dealing with those topics:

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Use AADConnect to add a Proxy Address

* UPDATE* After doing this originally, I decided to take a different route and write it back to the on-premises AD, so that way, the objects are synchronous.  This post now reflects the updated content.

A few weeks ago, I had an issue where I needed to remove a proxy address from the proxyAddresses array of a user being synchronized to Office 365. … [ Continue reading ]

Testing for bad SMTP Addresses

While working on my latest project,  I encountered a significant number of objects with malformed SMTP addresses.  These appeared to have been objects that had been somehow manually modified over the years by directly writing to the proxyAddresses attribute in Active Directory, bypassing an API that would check for correctly-formatted addresses.… [ Continue reading ]

How to Merge Duplicate Mail-Enabled User and Contact Objects

One of the first steps in preparing for an Office 365 migration is running a tool we provide called IDFix.  The goal of this tool is to help minimize identity issues when migrating to the cloud.  Most identity issues come down to two issues:

  • Invalid characters in key attributes
  • User objects with duplicate values in indexed attributes (duplicate objects)

The first issue is pretty easy to deal with–IDFix will identify objects with offending characters and the attributes where they exist, and will even make some recommendations. … [ Continue reading ]

Creating a Pinpoint DNS Zone

I saw an interesting question floating around a discussion alias earlier today–how to return different IP addresses for the same hostname from different DNS servers for users that are in different regions (for example, have DNS servers on the east coast return “1.2.3.4” for my.domain.com… [ Continue reading ]

Updating Remote Recipient Types on-Premises

During migrations from third-party platforms like Gmail or various POP3 providers or from hosted Exchange environments, we frequently see customers provisioning remote mailboxes for shared resources.

This works fine for three out of four recipient types. You can run New-RemoteMailbox for a regular user or specify a Type (Room or Equipment) to get the appropriate mailboxes. … [ Continue reading ]

Remove an unwanted ProxyAddress pattern from users via AADConnect

I had an interesting request from a customer the other day where they were synchronizing Active Directory into two disparate environments–Office 365 and another hosted Exchange environment.  In their new Office 365 environment, they didn’t want any address proxies matching a particular pattern to be part of a user’s proxyAddress array–BUT–they also didn’t want to remove them from their on-premises accounts since they are being used by their other hosting environment as an application routing address.… [ Continue reading ]

Office 365 License Assignment

There is perpetually a lot of angst around licensing users for Office 365 workloads.  Most of my customers over the years have wanted to ease into deployment, only enabling certain services at a time.  Of course, as an evergreen service, we are always adding features, leading to new service plans to disable as you discover them.… [ Continue reading ]

Remove a user’s oldest ActiveSync device

A few weeks ago, I saw something come up for a peer that needed a way to manage the maximum number of ActiveSync devices that a user had connected in Office 365.  Using only native Exchange policies, we can’t do that (MDM solutions solve this problem by manning the Exchange ActiveSync quarantine). … [ Continue reading ]