A client of ours had the following job for us: some of their workers had moved to an affiliated company with its own infrastructure. As a result, i was tasked to set up the Exchange (2003) server to forward their mail from their old addresses to their new ones. An easy task, right?
For the impatient sysadmin on the run, here are the bare bits: there is no easy and elegant way, at least none that i found. I have to do it manually, from Outlook, as the user. Which sucked. Badly.
To vent my frustration, i shall now painstakingly enumerate the methods that didn’t work. You might as well press the Next button now unless you enjoy reading about your fellow sysape’s sufferings.
Step zero: mung the user accounts
Since the workers had moved to another company, i changed their account passwords and moved them to another Organizational Unit in the Active Directory.
Step one: Using Outlook Web Access
As i didn’t know how to do this from the Exchange management interface, i started with an unelegant but straitforward approach: set a forwarding rule in Outlook. The shortest way to Outlook is Outlook Web Access. There, you can find a Settings section and set one rule to inform the sender (once) that their new email address is Firstname.Lastname@thatothercompany.com and another one to forward the mail to the new address.
I got two problems with this approach. For one, since two of the users had their mailbox sizes over Quota, their settings wouldn’t stick. And for the rest of the users, no forwarding happened. At all.
Step two: JFGI
It turns out that you can set up mail forwarding from Exchange after all. Open an Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) console on an Exchange server. Locate and right-click the user. Choose Properties. Select Exchange General > Delivery Options > Forwarding Address > (tick) > Forward to > Modify.
- First duh: You can’t type a free-text email address here, you’ve got to choose an Active Directory record.
- Second duh: After i created Contact objects (basically, an email address and a pretty name field for it) for all four users, i was unable to select any of them. I suppose the server would eventually synchronize, but it was late and i wasn’t in the mood for waiting.
Step three: Use brute force
Since the Bigger Hammer didn’t work, there was just one thing to do. Go manual. So i logged in (using remote desktop) to our admin box on site there, as the first of our four users. Indeed, the mail quota had been surpassed quite a few megs ago. So i created an Outlook data file (Archive.pst) and moved all the mail from the inbox there. It was a looooong job, i tell you. Moving thousands of mails onto an archive file on a server just isn’t the fastest thing to do.
When the inbox is reasonably empty, create a rule from Outlook > Tools > Rules and Alerts, or open the one that did stick on one or two of the accounts. Create an empty rule and apply following two things, the first of which is optional. Move the mail to a “FORWARDED” folder. And ask the mail to be rerouted, not forwarded, to the new address.
So that’s my last night in a nutshell. I want to go to bed now.
). Should be a logical extension to the Google Calendar.
