Recipients cover the broad spectrum of any object that can
receive mail, or mail-enabled objects. EAC groups four major types of
these objects under Recipients. These are:
The following sections discuss each of these recipient types and their management.
An email server such as Exchange deals with huge differences
in terms of object numbers. The largest Exchange organizations running
outside Office 365 have over half a million mail-enabled objects.
However, the smallest organizations might deal with just a few dozen
mailboxes. EAC is designed to handle anything from the smallest
demonstration environment to the largest production deployment.
Clearly,
only a limited amount of information can be presented on any computer
screen. As it moves to the different types of recipients, EAC displays
the initial set of objects in alphabetical order. To see different sets
of objects, you must either scroll down through pages of data (tiresome
if the object you want is a number of pages down) or use the EAC search
capabilities.
EAC
does not support the same kind of recipient-filtering capabilities as
does EMC, which allows the console to focus on specific sets of objects
such as all the mailboxes in a specific database. Instead, all the
sections of EAC that might deal with large numbers of objects,
including recipients, have a search box in which you can type some
characters to request EAC to display matching objects. Figure 1
shows how the search box works when dealing with mailboxes. In this
instance, EAC has detected that you might be searching against the
various name attributes stored for mailboxes. Not all mailbox
properties can be used for searching. For example, you cannot search
against the company attribute, but you can against the department.
EAC
also includes an Advanced Search option available by clicking the
ellipsis. This option is available for all recipient types and can be
used to look for any recipient of the selected type (mailboxes, groups,
contacts, public folders), using values such as those stored in the 15
custom attributes available for Exchange mail-enabled recipients.
Advanced Search is the closest to the kind of filtering that EMC offers
and is just as powerful.
Exporting EAC information to CSV files
EAC includes an option to export the current list view to a
comma-separated values (CSV) file. CSV files are often used to work
with Exchange data because they can be loaded into applications such as
Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access and then manipulated before being
reused for some purpose. For instance, the standard method used by
Exchange 2013 to move mailboxes is to create and process migration
batches . You can input a set of mailbox names to be
moved, or you can provide EAC with a CSV file containing the set. Say
you wanted to move all the mailboxes that are currently in database DB2
to a new database. To do this, you’d specify database = DB2
in an advanced search. After you execute the search, EAC displays all
the mailboxes in the database. You can then click the ellipsis and
choose to export the current view to a CSV file. You then select the
fields to be exported (only the email address field is necessary for a
migration batch) and click Export. EAC generates a CSV file you can
open with Notepad (Figure 2).
This
is a very simple example of how mailbox information can be exported and
reused within Exchange 2013. You can export information to a CSV file
by using similar steps for any of the object types that are managed
through the recipients section.
Some mysterious mailboxes
Although they exist, EAC does not reveal the existence of system mailboxes. In this respect, you have:
Arbitration mailboxes, including the discovery search mailboxes . Exchange uses arbitration mailboxes for
many purposes, including message moderation. To see details of these
mailboxes, you execute the Get-Mailbox –Arbitration command.
Mailboxes
created to test and measure system health. Exchange creates these for
use by the Managed Availability system to test that different
components of the system are working correctly. For example, Exchange
uses health mailboxes to send messages to each other to verify that the
transport system is working as expected. You can see the set of health
mailboxes within an organization by running the Get-Mailbox –Monitoring
command.
Mailboxes
created for test purposes. For example, the
New-TestCASConnectivityUser.ps1 script provided with Exchange creates a
mailbox called extest_867e89ec8f7b4.
These
mailboxes have a clearly intended purpose; otherwise, Exchange would
not create them. For this reason, you should not delete or otherwise
change their Active Directory accounts or mailbox details. The
exception to this rule is when you want to remove a mailbox database
that contains some arbitration or discovery mailboxes. In this case,
you always need to move these mailboxes out of the database before you
can remove it.