Exchange Server System Management:
Administration & Guidance

In this section, you will learn how to administer and take advantage of the powerful capabilities of Microsoft Exchange Server. Want to add an additional SMTP domain in your organisation? Or increase the storage capacity of Exchange Server 2003 (with SP2) to allow your database to grow up to 72GB (Standard Edition) from 18GB! Perhaps you just want to protect your organisation from being an "Open Relay" - a common cause for spam abuse on your servers.

You will also learn how to fix common troubleshooting issues with Microsoft Exchange. Do you have you have Exchange installed on a Domain Controller? Do you find that the services do not start correctly on reboot when on a domain controller? If so, read more!

Whatever the case may be, read on to learn more from Guru Guy!

---

Adding an additional SMTP domain to your organisation via Exchange Recipient Policies

So has your company recently bought another email domain that you would like to start using in Exchange/Active Directory? Or perhaps you would like to give another email address to all of your domain users automatically? Do you want to enforce initial dot surname as an email address automatically as your email account policy for users? Well, Guru Guy explains all...

Recipient Policies are what tells your Exchange Server what domains you own and what policies to do with them; and replace the function of site addressing in Exchange Server 5.5, with a little more flexibility. Site addressing applied proxy addressing rules to all users in a site, whereas recipient policies give more flexibility on how you group the users to whom the addressing rules apply.

1. The first thing you need to do, is make sure the domain you wish to add to your organisation points to your Exchange/SMTP mail server. When you purchase a domain, you configure A records (which specify the website IP address of the www domain, amongst other things) and MX records, or Mail Exchange records which tell the DNS Servers around the world who is responsible for mail for that domain. Make sure at this stage, your MX records point to your Exchange server's public IP address. Make sure you have not configured your Exchange Server as an Open Relay however!
2. You can use policies to add SMTP addresses to your users accounts. Alternatively, you can administer any of these properties individually
   by accessing the user object from the Active Directory Users and Computers; but this guide will assume you shall use a recipient policy. It is important whether you wish to deploy a new email  address via a recipient policy or not, that the SMTP domain is listed as an available domain in the recipient policy. If not, the Exchange Server is not aware of this being a domain your organisation is responsible for.
3. You can define a policy that states that all users with the company name
   Guru Guy Ltd have an SMTP address of alias@guruguy.com. 
4. Start the Microsoft Exchange System Manager;
5. Expand Organisation ->Recipients, and then click "Recipient Policies" (as below);
   
6. Right-click "Recipient Policies" -> New, and then click Recipient Policy, or you can modify the default domain policy (which applies to all).
7. Specify an LDAP filter (that is, to whom the policy applies) and the e-mail addresses for these recipients.
8. If you would like to add a new domain to your organisation to support one you recently purchased, add it here so Exchange knows it is now under its control. You can specify a policy on how email generation applies. For example, if you would like Guru Guy to have a policy of initial.surname, (g.guy@) you enter: 
   %1g.%s@domain.com
9. Anything you specify in the recipient policy is applied immediately and will be enforced within an hour.

---

Increase the Database Size Limit in Exchange 2003 SP2

Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Standard Edition allowed only an 16GB database size limit. In the modern world, this limit would be reached a little too quickly for any administrator's liking. You know when you reached this limit, as your Exchange Database Store dismounts with an event log error 1112, "The database Mailbox Store (Server Name) has reached the maximum allowed size. Attempting to unmount the database." from the ExchangeIS Service.

Fortunately, since Microsoft released Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2, both versions of Exchange Server 2003 with SP2 have the ability to configure a higher database limit, a warning threshold, and a warning interval set through registry keys.

The database size limit registry keys are read when the database mounts (not when the Exchange service starts up), and when each limit check task runs. If you modify the database limit value in the registry you must reset the registry keys manually if the server has to be rebuilt using the /disasterecovery setup switch.

Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. Open the Windows Registry Editor (Regedit);
2. Navigate to:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIS\<SERVER
   NAME>\Private-013e2e46-2cd7-4a8e-bfec-0e4652b94b00
   (Private GUID will be unique to your system)
   
3. Create or Modify the following REG DWORD registry keys (in Decimal) to enable your new database limit:

---

How to configure your Exchange Server/IIS SMTP Service to prevent it from being an Open Relay.

Exchange Server 2000, 2003 and IIS 5 (Windows 2000) and IIS 6, by default, are not set up sufficiently to protect themselves from being an Open Relay.

So what's an open relay? An Open Relay is an SMTP server that is used for relaying (forwarding) unsolicited commercial e-mail messages, or spam. An organisation may find their internet/email server being extremely slow and their own email being blocked with bounce-back messages as their IP address is "known to originate spam". 

Guru Guy has detailed the steps you need to take to lock down your Server from being an open relay to protect you and your organisation from spam abuse.

1. There are two Exchange Server components that permit SMTP relaying to be turned on or off:
   The Default SMTP Virtual Server
   The SMTP Connector
   Depending on whether you have Exchange Server installed will depend on where you shall find these items. (IIS configuration is under Computer Management -> Internet Information Services -> SMTP Service)
   
2. Load the Microsoft Exchange System Manager.
3. Expand Servers, Servername, Protocols, and then expand SMTP.
   
4. Right-click Default SMTP Virtual Server and then click Properties.
5. Click the Access tab.
6. Click the Relay button at the bottom.
7. The default settings block open relay. The default settings are as follows:

   • Select Only the list below.
   • The Computers dialog box shows Access Granted to the Internal IP address of the Small Business Server network and to the external IP address (if the server has more than one network card.)
   • Make sure that Allow all computers which successfully authenticate to relay, regardless of the list above is selected.
     
8. OK out of all open dialogues - your SMTP service changes have been made. Restart the SMTP Service to ensure your changes have immediate affect and test to see if you are an Open Relay from below.

How to test if you are an Open Relay

1. Start -> Run, type telnet, and then click OK.
2. At the Telnet command prompt, type set local_echo, and then press ENTER.
3. At the Telnet command prompt, type open Exchange-IP-address 25, and then press ENTER (where Exchange-IP-address is the external public IP address of the Exchange/SMTP Server computer).
   
   The output is similar to the following:

   220 server.smallbusiness.local Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version: X.XXXX.XXX ready at "date" -0500

   
   
4. Type ehlo google.com, and then press ENTER. Make sure that the last line is:

   250 OK
5. Type mail from:youremail@anydomain.com, and then press ENTER (where youremail@anydomain is an SMTP address that is not hosted on the Exchange Server computer). Make sure that the result is:

   250 2.1.0 youremail@anydomain.com....Sender OK
6. Type rcpt to:user@fakedomain.com, and then press ENTER (where user@fakedomain is not your e-mail domain). Make sure that the result is one of the following two responses:

   550 5.7.1 Unable to relay for user@fakedomain.com
   -or-
   250 2.1.5 user@fakedomain.com
7. If the result is "550 5.7.1 Unable to relay for user@fakedomain.com," the Exchange server is not an open SMTP relay. If the result is "250 2.1.5 user@fakedomain.com," then the Exchange server is an open SMTP relay. 
   

---

Like what you've read? Was this of help? Contact Guru Guy to let him have your feedback!

Now why not visit Guru Guy's Vintage Computer Webshop to grab classic Vintage Computer Server Software!