Recipe7.24.Setting Up a Role Email Address

Recipe 7.24. Setting Up a Role Email Address

Problem

You have a role account such as "postmaster" for which you need to accept messages.

Discussion

This problem is actually pretty simple to solve; in fact, it is so simple to solve that there are at least four different ways to solve it:

A mailbox-enabled user: Creating a new user and mailbox for each role address is perhaps the simplest method up-front, but it is not terribly scalable if you have a large number of role addresses to manage. Under Exchange 5.5, you could just create a new mailbox and associate it with an existing user, but the one-to-one link between mailboxes and user accounts in Active Directory prohibits this and leads to a lot of overhead. Busy role accounts will need to be checked often by at least one delegate, possibly more, to avoid running into quota issues.
A mail-enabled group: A distribution group provides an easy way to send role account email to multiple recipient mailboxes, as well as providing an easy method to control recipient access. However, busy role accounts will raise traffic levels for every member of the group, leading to possible quota troubles.
A mail-enabled public folder: If you are using public folders in your organization or are willing to begin, this option offers a lot of benefits, including freedom from worries about quotas in your user mailboxes.
Secondary mail address on an existing mail-enabled resource: This option makes use of existing mail-enabled objects in Active Directory, such as users, groups, or public folders, and gives them secondary email addresses. You can add multiple addresses via the ADUC MMC snap-in or by using ADSI scripting to manipulate the contents of the proxyAddresses attribute on the desired object.

There is at least one role account every email installation must have to be RFC-compliant, as well as one more that is strongly recommended if you intend to be a good network neighbor in dealing with any email abuse issues that may originate from your organization:

postmaster
abuse

In addition, there are many others you probably should make sure are valid, such as the responsible email address listed in your external DNS zone file (commonly hostmaster), webmaster for issues regarding your web site, info for business queries, and more. RFC 2142, "Mailbox Names for Common Services, Roles, and Functions" provides a proposed standard for these role addresses and when they should be deployed; you can view the RFC at http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2142.txt.