The mystery of the missing Microsoft Exchange recipients

David M Williams
Tuesday, 21 April 2009 18:35

Business IT - Technology

My company has a number of domains and we have e-mail address policies set up. In Exchange 2007’s Exchange Management Console (EMC) you’ll find this under Organization Configuration / Hub Transport / E-mail Address Policies. These take the form of conditions (eg “if user’s ‘Company’ field is xxx”) and rules to automatically generate e-mail addresses (eg “%g% This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ” to set addresses of the form This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .)

You need not even have multiple domains to use e-mail address policies. You can still set a solitary default policy to ensure all your users are set up with a consistent e-mail address.

In the EMC, click Recipient Configuration / Mailbox and double-click any user. Click the E-mail Addresses tab. In my case, and that of anyone else using e-mail address policies, the “Automatically update e-mail addresses based on recipient policy” box ought to be ticked. This ensures the e-mail addresses have been set correctly.

However, what happens if your policy wants to use an e-mail address that clashes with somebody else? For instance, your policy is first-name-last-initial and you have a Fred Smith and now hire Fred Smythe? The first person already got This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and the second lucks out. Exchange will assign the e-mail address This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Fortunately, Exchange admins are pretty eagle-eyed and this gets noticed. The fix is a bit manual; you need to uncheck the “Automatically update” box, add a new address (like This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ), set it to be the default SMTP address, and remove the auto-generated address.

Now, check the General tab for your user. The E-mail address field is the one we’re interested in. Unless this matches the default SMTP address, this person will be missing from the offline address book.

You can see why there is a discrepancy in the situation I described where e-mail address policies have been used but the default address was subsequently changed. In practicality, there may be many reasons why the default SMTP address is altered, or perhaps the E-mail address field itself has been manually edited later.

Whatever the cause, if you find your users complaining someone can’t be found in the company address book check here; make sure the E-mail address field and the default SMTP address match up.

Mystery solved!