Exchange-Genie

Exchange 2007 continues to provide flexability for administrators to customize DSN or user notifications. This can only be done from EMS (Exchange Management Shell), but is easy to configure.

For this article I will configure 2 items 1. custom quota notification and 2. custom DSN for internal users only.

Custom Quota Notifiation:
Lets start by setting a user account to a low send/recieve quota so that we can generate the notification.

Open EMS
Set-Mailbox brian.tirch -IssueWarningQuota 8kb -ProhibitSendQuota 12kb

This will set my user account to recieve an warning message at 8kb and prohibsend at 12kb (large mailbox huh)

Now that we have reduced the mailbox size lets setup our custom system message for our users

Open EMS
New-SystemMessage -Language EN -QuotaMessageType warningmailbox -Text “You need to delete some items from your inbox befor you go over your limit!”

The command above sets the warning message, now I will set the prohibit send message
New-SystemMessage -Language EN -QuotaMessageType prohibitsendmailbox -Text “Your mailbox is over its limit because you did not read the warning you canot send emails until you reduce your mailbox size!”

If you perform a Get-Systemmessage we can see the 2 newly created user notifications.

I logged onto OWA and sent my Brian account an attachment to cause the system to generate the notification messages.

If we use the get-mailboxdatabase command we can see the by default the notification are set to be send each night between 12 and 12:15.

I am going to change this to speed up my notification processget-mailboxdatabase Set-MailboxDatabase -QuotaNotificationSchedule “Wed.9:00 PM-Fri.9:30 pm”

As you can see we have now recieved our custom notification

Configuring custom DSN
Often users make mistakes when trying to send to user a typo etc… I am going to create a custome DSN for an invalid users.

Lets start by attempting to send to a user that does not exist and see the NDR we get back.

You can see we receieved an NDR with status code
#550 5.1.1 RESOLVER.ADR.RecipNotFound; not found ##

Lets create a custom NDR that can provide our users with some steps to check before they attempt to contact the help desk generating support.
New-SystemMessage -DsnCode 5.1.1 -Text “The intended recpient was not found on your Exchange Organization please check the following: 1. Was the recipients name spelled correctly, 2. try deleting your Outlook Cache and resending. If these steps do not fix the problem contact the user to validate thier email address or contact support a xxxxx” -Internal $true -Language EN
we have now created a custom message, so lets generate an NDR and see what happens

Notice I created this code to internal only, so that external users, spammers etc… do not get this private information.

References:
Understanding Quota Messages http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb232173.aspx
How to Manage Quota Messages http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb232089.aspx
New-SystemMessage http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998878.aspx