Recipe17.23.Creating a Recipient Policy

Recipe 17.23. Creating a Recipient Policy

Problem

You want to create a recipient policy to configure an alternate email address or mailbox manager policy.

Solution

Using a graphical user interface

Open the Exchange System Manager (ESM) snap-in.
In the left pane, browse to the Recipients
Right-click on Recipient Policies and select New
Select the property pages you want on the recipient policy form and click OK.
Enter the recipient policy name.
Click on Filter Rules, click Modify, select the search criteria, click OK.
Read the warning message that is displayed and click OK.
Set the desired policies on the E-Mail Addresses (Policy) and Mailbox Manager Settings (Policy) tabs.
When you are done, click OK.

Discussion

Recipient policies are used for controlling how the RUS stamps mail-enabled objects. It is in charge of stamping objects with the correct email addresses as well as Mailbox Manager settings, such as automatically deleting and reporting on messages that exceed certain ages and sizes. Companies that have multiple divisions and want different email addresses for users in the different divisions use multiple recipient policies for configuring the email addresses. Each recipient policy has a filter that specifies the mailboxes it should configure with its rules.

Recipient policy is too involved to do simply from the command line or through VBScript. Several of the values in the Active Directory msExchRecipientPolicy class are binary types, which are not trivial to manipulate with LDIF or VBScript. If you wish to programmatically create recipient policies, you can do it, but you will need to use something a bit more involved, such as Visual Basic or C++.

Managing recipient policies requires Exchange Service Administrator permissions. See the Discussion for Recipe 17.7.

One note of warning: do not test the manipulation of recipient policies in your production environment. Changes to recipient policies get stamped on many or possibly all mail-enabled objects in the directory, and you could unintentionally bring down entire sections of your mail delivery system. Due to its widespread effect, you could have great difficulty getting it all back up and running quickly. One company that shall remain unnamed had gone through a merger process and was trying to standardize some of their mail systems. Unfortunately, they unintentionally changed the primary email address of more than 100,000 employees with one small incorrect recipient policy change. Due to the type of mistake, this wasn't noticed internally. It took a couple of days for people outside of the company to notice and report the issue to the company before it was corrected. In the meanwhile, most email going into the company from the outside was not properly delivered.