Exchange does not create the actual mailbox in the assigned
database until the user first logs on to the mailbox or, if required,
to deliver a message to the new mailbox. At this point, Exchange
creates the various special folders it needs to process email,
including the Inbox, Sent Items, and Deleted Items or the equivalent in
a selected non-English language.
For instance, if a user selects
Polish as her preferred language, the Inbox is then displayed as
“Skrzynka odbiorcza,” Sent Items becomes “Elementy wyslane,” and
Deleted Items is “Elementy usuniete,” whereas switching to Portuguese
produces “A Receber,” “Itens Enviados,” and “Itens Eliminados.”
Exchange
2010 also enables users to switch languages, but if you switch from,
say, English to French, the names of the special folders remain in
English. This is an unsatisfactory situation, so a solution is
presented in Exchange 2013 by which you can instruct Exchange to update
the names of the special folders when you choose to use a different
language (Figure 3).
Note that you won’t see this option presented if you are switching to a
language that uses the same values for special folder names as your
current language, as in the case of switching from English (U.S.) to
English (Ireland) (en-us to en-ie) behind the scenes.
Manipulating mailbox settings
Exchange
provides a set of cmdlets by which administrators can query and set
properties of mailboxes. You can think of this as administrative access
to the options that users have to configure their mailboxes through
Outlook or Outlook Web App. These properties are stored as hidden items
in the root of user mailboxes and are not accessible to administrators
in previous versions of Exchange. Table 2 lists the elements of mailbox configuration that administrators can manipulate and the cmdlets used for this purpose.
Table 2. Mailbox configuration cmdlets
Purpose | Cmdlets |
|---|
Change regional preferences (language, date format, time zone) | Get-MailboxRegionalConfiguration
Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration |
Change the auto-reply settings | Get-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration
Set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration |
Change mailbox calendar settings and how the Calendar Assistant processes incoming requests | Get-MailboxCalendarConfiguration
Set-MailboxCalendarConfiguration
Get-CalendarProcessing
Set-CalendarProcessing |
List or add mailbox folders | Get-MailboxFolder
New-MailboxFolder |
Change general mailbox settings | Get-MailboxMessageConfiguration
Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration |
Change spelling settings | Get-MailboxSpellingConfiguration
Set-MailboxSpellingConfiguration |
Change junk mail settings | Get-MailboxJunkEMailConfiguration
Set-MailboxJunkEMailConfiguration |
Before you attempt to query or set the properties of a mailbox, make
sure that you have the necessary access rights to the mailbox. The
Add-MailboxPermission cmdlet can be used as follows:
Add-MailboxPermission –Identity 'Rob Young –User 'Europe Help Desk' -AccessRights FullAccess
Mailboxes
assume a default regional configuration based on the language and
regional settings of the server on which they are created. If your
server runs the U.S. English version of Exchange in the Pacific Time
Zone, any mailboxes you create on that server inherit these settings
along with other associated settings such as date and time format.
Users can change these settings with a client, such as the options
Outlook Web App presents, to select a language the first time a user
logs on to his mailbox. To retrieve the default regional configuration
for a mailbox:
Get-MailboxRegionalConfiguration –Identity 'John Smith'
Use
the Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration cmdlet to tweak the regional
settings. In this example, the mailbox language, time zone, and date
format are set:
Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration –Identity 'John Smith' –Language 'Es-es'
–TimeZone 'Eastern Standard Time' –DateFormat 'dd-mmm-yyyy'
Get-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration
and Set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration query and set the auto-reply
settings for a mailbox. Users receive auto-reply messages when they
send email to mailboxes that have an auto-reply message configured and
enabled. Exchange also uses the auto-reply message as a MailTip that is
displayed to users when they address a new message to a user who has
auto-reply enabled. To find out the mailboxes in a database that have
auto-reply currently set and the time the auto-reply lapses, you can
use the following command:
Get-Mailbox –Database 'VIP Data' | Get-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration | Where {$_.AutoReplyState –eq 'Scheduled'} | Select MailboxOwnerId, EndTimeIf
you review the auto-reply data maintained for a mailbox, you can see
the auto-reply text the user has created to send to internal and
external recipients:
Get-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration –Identity 'Kim Akers' | Format-List AutoReplyState, EndTime, External*
AutoReplyState : Scheduled
You
can also set up a new auto-reply for a user who has gone on vacation
and forgotten to let anyone know. In this instance, you enable
auto-reply, set a time limit, and create separate messages for internal
and external audiences. You also tell Exchange that auto-replies go
only to external correspondents who are known contacts for the
recipient.
Set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration -Identity 'Kim Akers' -StartTime '12/10/2013 19:30'
-AutoReplyState Enabled -EndTime '12/15/2013 07:00'
–InternalMessage 'Kim Akers is on vacation and will respond to your message after she returns on December 15'
–ExternalMessage 'Kim Akers is on vacation' –ExternalAudience 'Known'
To turn off auto-reply for a user:
Set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration –Identity 'Kim Akers' –AutoReplyState Disabled
Users
might continue to see an auto-reply MailTip even after it expires or is
disabled. This is because the Mailbox server caches auto-reply
information to prevent it from having to look up mailbox auto-reply
data every time a message is addressed. The cached data is refreshed
every hour.
The Get-MailboxCalendarConfiguration and
Set-MailboxCalendarConfiguration cmdlets query and set the properties
of calendar settings. For example, this command configures the calendar
to use Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the time zone with a starting time
for the workday of 8:30 A.M.:
Set-MailboxCalendarConfiguration -Identity 'Kim Akers'
–WorkingHoursTimeZone 'GMT Standard Time' -WorkingHoursStartTime 08:30:00
The
Set-CalendarProcessing cmdlet determines how the Calendar Assistant
processes calendar requests that arrive in mailboxes. Although it is
possible for administrators to manipulate these settings for a user
through the EMC console, you can’t do this with EAC. Instead, a user
can change his settings through Outlook Web App (Options, Settings,
Calendar), but administrators are limited to EMS. For example, this
command sets the properties that control how forwarded meeting
notifications and external meeting requests are processed.
Set-CalendarProcessing –Identity 'Akers, Kim' –RemoveForwardedMeetingNotifications $True –ProcessExternalMeetingMessages $True
The
Set-CalendarProcessing cmdlet is capable of doing much more than
manipulating the limited set of properties revealed through Outlook Web
App, especially for resource mailboxes. See the Exchange help file for
more information.
The Get-MailboxFolder and New-MailboxFolder
cmdlets can be used to retrieve a list of folders in a mailbox or
create a new folder. You can decide to retrieve just top-level folders
or the complete set, or you can look for specific details about a
folder and its children. Note that even highly permissioned users
cannot use these cmdlets to interrogate the folders within another
user’s mailbox. By design, the cmdlets only work inside the mailbox
owned by the user who runs EMS. Here’s the command to retrieve a
complete list of mail-related folders from the current user’s mailbox:
Get-MailboxFolder –Recurse -MailFolderOnly
To create a new folder called Exchange 2013 in the top level of the Administrator’s mailbox:
New-MailboxFolder -Parent 'Administrator' -Name 'Exchange 2013'
Get-MailboxMessageConfiguration
and Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration retrieve and set general properties
of a mailbox. For example, to define that Exchange should append an
autosignature to every outgoing message and to provide the text for the
autosignature:
Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration -Identity 'John Smith'
-AutoAddSignature $True –SignatureText 'From the desk of John Smith'
Get-MailboxJunkEmailConfiguration
and Set-MailboxJunkEmailConfiguration query and set the properties that
control a user’s junk mail settings. The most interesting of these
properties are the trusted senders and blocked senders lists. Both are
multivalued properties, so you have to manipulate them in a variable
before updating the property with new values, for example, to add the
cohowinery.com domain to the blocked senders list. This cmdlet
generates an error if you attempt to run it against a mailbox that has
never been logged on to by a user because Exchange doesn’t create the
junk mail configuration for a mailbox until after it is first used.
$List = Get-MailboxJunkEMailConfiguration –Identity 'John Smith'
$List.BlockedSendersAndDomains += 'cohowinery.com'
Set-MailboxJunkEMailConfiguration –Identity 'John Smith' –BlockedSendersAndDomains
$List.BlockedSendersAndDomains
Of
course, users can overwrite these settings by using Outlook or Outlook
Web App after you’ve updated any of their mailbox settings. If you have
given your account the permission to access a mailbox, make sure that
you remove the access after you’ve adjusted all the required regional
settings. This example uses the Remove-MailboxPermission cmdlet to
remove the full-access rights to the mailbox with which you have been
working from the Europe Help Desk account.
Remove-MailboxPermission -Identity 'John Smith' -User 'Europe Help Desk' -AccessRights FullAccess
