SMTP Address Already in Use
Sep0
You know how you sometimes add an SMTP alias to an Exchange account as a quick way to deliver mail to someone, but then (months later) you decide you need to assign that alias somewhere else and can’t remember who it was assigned to previously?
All you get is the oh-so-helpful error:
Yea… that part sucks, ’cause there’s no easy way to search through Active Directory by SMTP address, right?
Wrong.
You can… and it’s not difficult. Let’s say you want to find the account that has thisaddress@mycompany.com assigned to it as an alias. Very simply, just do the following:
- Open Users and Computers
- Create a new Saved Query
- Define the query: Custom Search –> Advanced
- Use the following as your query definition:
proxyaddresses=smtp:thisaddress@mycompany.com
Save it and search… it’s really that simple. Check out MSExchange.org for more examples and much more in-depth descriptions of the above process.
Active Directory – Protip!
Sep0
I knew there was a way to do this and kept forgetting about it, so here’s another little tidbit of info that I’d like to document here in the blog for future reference.
If you’ve ever created a pantload of saved queries in Active Directory Users & Computers (dsa.msc), you know how frustrating it is to attempt to move those queries from one machine to another. No, you don’t have to export each one as an .xml file and then import it into a new dsa.msc on another computer.
Simply find the following file (on Windows XP… Vista and Win7 will be in C:\Users):
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\MMC\dsa
Copy that file into the same path on your new machine. Just be sure that dsa.msc is closed on the new one when you do this, otherwise it overwrites your freshly copied version with the default file.