Category Archives: Exchange Server 2013

Cherish your arbitration mailboxes – just in case!

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Arbitration mailboxes made their appearance in Exchange 2010 as a special form of mailbox that is designed to be used by Exchange itself rather than a user. In short, there are times when Exchange needs to stuff data away for one reason or another and it makes sense to use a mailbox for this purpose. After all, mailboxes go in databases and can be protected by high availability, and so on…

The full set of arbitration mailboxes is exposed in all its glory by running the command:

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Recycled email addresses and Outlook nicknames

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The revelations (last October) that Microsoft is quietly recycling email addresses from its Hotmail, Live, and Outlook.com domains might have come as a surprise to some. According to an email statement from Microsoft to PCWorld.com cited in the article, when an account becomes inactive, “the email account is automatically queued for deletion from our servers.

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Managing the dumpster – setting quotas for the Recoverable Items folder

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The “dumpster” has been a feature of Exchange since Exchange 2000 to provide a last-chance opportunity for users to recover deleted items without having to ask an administrator to restore data from a backup. The current implementation, introduced in Exchange 2010, uses a folder structure under the Recoverable Items folder rather than a special database view.

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Understanding the overhead in an Exchange mailbox database

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It’s taken me a while to get around to mentioning the rather useful “Database Growth Reporting” script for Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2013 that was described on the EHLO blog in January.  My apologies for this lapse in service. All I can plead is that other stuff got in the way between now and then and that I never really had a chance to test the code out thoroughly, which is a prerequisite before commenting on software.

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The path to native high availability for Exchange

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I received quite a few notes after recent posts covering how Exchange’s storage demands have evolved over the last decade and what this means for third-party vendors who sell high-end storage. Some pointed out that the storage vendors won’t mind too much if some of their market has disappeared because Exchange now favors JBOD.

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Lots of Exchange on-premises updates to install

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Microsoft launched Exchange 2016 on October 1, 2015. Five-and-a-half months later Exchange 2016 has its first cumulative update (CU1) along with a batch of other updates – Exchange 2013 CU12, Exchange 2010 SP3 RU13, and Exchange 2007 SP3 RU19.

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Exchange 4.0 cleared to fly 20 years ago today

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I awoke this morning to a note from Iain McDonald to remind me that it was twenty years ago today that Microsoft approved the release of build 837 of a new product called Exchange Server. After being signed off in March 1996, the formal launch happened the following June. It took time to get the “gold” build sent to manufacturing so that copies could be distributed to customers plus all the ancillary activities such as marketing.

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The @ legacy of Ray Tomlinson

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I was sad to learn of the death of Ray Tomlinson on March 5. For those who don’t know, Ray was the engineer who figured out how to send email between computers in 1971. Part of that effort was the selection of the at sign (@) as the delimitation between personal account name and email domain for addressing messages.

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The downside of being a filer and other reasons why Outlook’s cached limits might bite you

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One of the points I made in “How Exchange’s Recover Deleted Items option could be improved” is that it would be nice if Exchange could track the folder that an item was deleted from so that the item could be restored there if required. Some said that this wasn’t needed because they never use anything but the Inbox and Sent Items folders.

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Exchange mailbox anchoring runs into stormy waters

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When Microsoft announced that Exchange 2013 CU11 and Exchange 2016 CU12 would implement a “mailbox anchoring”, a new way of connecting Exchange Management Shell (EMS – or PowerShell if you like) sessions to Exchange servers, I weighed in with some thoughts on the topic and basically said that the new approach was a good idea.

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