Tips for managing the Exchange Server 2007 Console views
Published Jan 19 2007 12:52 PM 4,164 Views

In Exchange 2007, the Recipient Configuration node and its child nodes (Mailbox, Distribution Group, Mail Contact, Disconnected Mailbox) of the Exchange Management Console (console) are used for recipient management. By default, up to 1000 recipients in the current domain are displayed in the result pane of the Recipient Configuration node and its child nodes. For organizations with more than 1000 recipients, 1000 recipients have to be displayed by default while they may not be the specific set of recipients that you want to manage, and you may not want to wait until they are displayed. This article gives a few tips to manage and speed up the console view.

Tip#1: Scope the recipients to be displayed to a specific domain or OU level

You can control the scope of recipients shown to a domain or OU by using the "Modify Recipient Scope" context menu of the Recipient Configuration node. Narrowing down the recipient scope improves performance as it reduces the scope to query specific recipients and the number of recipients to display in the console. This also improves manageability if you use a domain or OU-based organizational design. The scope set at this top level applies to the recipient objects of the Recipient Configuration node and also its child nodes Mailbox, Distribution Group and Mail Contact.

Tip#2: Set a smaller maximum number of recipients to display

You can set the maximum number of recipients to display to a smaller value than the default value 1000 using the "Modify the Maximum Number of Recipients to Display" context menu of the Recipient Configuration and its child nodes Mailbox, Distribution Group and Mail Contact to reduce the number of recipients to display in the result pane. This takes less time to load recipients, but it only works if your scoped and/or filtered recipients have fewer results than this smaller maximum number of recipients to display. Or else, you'll have to enlarge this maximum number to load all intentional recipients.

Tip#3: Save a filter as a default filter for a result pane

A filter is used to display specific recipients that you want to manage. You can save a filter as a default filter for a result pane by accessing the "View" menu and then the "Save Current Filter as Default" context menu of the Recipient Configuration node or its child nodes. Each time you go to the Recipient Configuration node or its child nodes, the default filter is applied to display a specific set of recipients.

This tip also applies to the Server Configuration node and its child nodes (Mailbox, Client Access, Hub Transport and Unified Messaging), whose result panes have filter settings.

Tip#4: Click the "Stop Loading" button to stop the display of recipients

When the result pane is displaying recipients, there is a "Stop Loading" button available on top-right side of the result pane. You can click it to stop of the display of recipients instead of waiting for the load to finish. Press "F5" or click the "Refresh" context menu of the Recipient Configuration node or its child node to restart loading the recipients.

Queue Viewer

Queue Viewer contains Queues and Messages tabs and a result pane for each tab with filter settings. The list of queues and messages in Queue Viewer can be very large, depending on the current mail flow. Unlike the display of recipients in the console, queues and messages are displayed in Queue Viewer using multiple pages with each page displaying 1000 queues or messages by default.

The above Tip#2 and Tip#3 can be applied to Queue View similarly to speed up the display of queues and messages:

  • Change the number of queues or messages displayed on each page of Queues and Messages tabs by using the "View" menu, then "Options" submenu and the "Number of items to display on each page" field.
  • You can create a filter to display the specific set of queues or messages that you want to monitor and save it as default of the Messages or Queues result pane by using the "View" and then "Save Current Filter as Default" context menu of the result pane.

- Jared (Ji-Chao) Zhang 

21 Comments
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Apple iPhone for now ignoring synch to Exchange, other e-mail platforms Configuring, validating and monitoring
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My ex2007 migration is complete!  Things went fairly smoothly although there were definitely a couple of interesting speed bumps that didn't come up when I tested similarly configured 32-bit vmware machines in my lab.

One big question though - like others I am a bit dismayed by the divorce of exchange mgmt from ADUC - but I am hopeful that they will converge again with longhorn server likely moving towards powershell...  but my main question is, where/how can I find a view similar to the mailbox view in Exchange 2003 System Manager?  i.e. how can I list out all the mailboxes in a database and sort them by size, etc?

thanks guys!
-Wes
wes@myf.org
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I see that I can create a filter to show users that are on a particular database, but I can't seem to find a way to add the mailbox size to the columns under view.

How do I list out the size of my users' mailboxes?
thanks guys!
Wes
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Esse artigo visa explicar algumas "dicas" (ou tips, em inglês) para o administrador de redes e responsável
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Yes, I need this information too. How do I sort by mailbox size within Exchange Management Console? This interfaces at first glance is lacking many features that the Exchange 2003 console has.
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wow, why did you guys take SO MUCH out of the gui?  I just realized you can't even set the message size limits on receive connectors in the GUI.  Why take that out?
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Answers to the questions:
1. There is no plan to go back to combine Exchange mgmt with ADUC. Please post questions with the current EMC, we'd like to help figure them out or add the missing features in future releases.

2. Mailbox size is not an optional column or filter field in the console now, so we cann't add this column or sort the mailboxes by size in the console. Part of the reason is that mailbox size is one property horned by Store (returned by Get-MailboxStatistics), to retrieve this property along with other mailbox properties horned by AD (returned by Get-Mailbox) we need to access Store in addition to accessing AD, this could be a perf issue, expecially in case of a huge amount of mailboxes.

You can use below PS cmdline to list all mailboxes on the <mbdb> database and sort them by message size:
[PS] D:>Get-Mailbox -Database <mbdb> | Get-MailboxStatistics | select DisplayName,TotalItemSize |
sort TotalItemSize

3. For the message size limits on receive connections, did you change this setting often? Or you just set it once while setting up the organization. As the convention, we expost the most common settings in the GUI and kept other advanced settings in the cmdline.

Thanks for all the feedback! ~
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Hi Jared, thanks for the cmdline tip for mailbox size.

I guess I consider the message size limits as something that most admins will want to touch (unless their policy happens to line up exactly with the default 10 mb limit).

I understand that there will be no reconvergence with ADUC - but could you speak a bit to how powershell will be used in longhorn server and possible integration there?

Consider our situation - we used to copy a user in the exchange-aware ADUC, which took care of things such as extended attributes, msExchUseOAB, msExchQueryBaseDN, and others -- but now we have to do a user copy in the basic win2003 ADUC, then use the exchange tools to stamp exchange attributes, then go back with adsi edit to put in those mxExch custom settings -- it triples the work...

Another example is enabling or disabling attachments in OWA.  By default they are disabled and there's nothing in the gui - I had to dig into set-owavirtualdirectory to get them set.

I am not trying to be negative, but I guess I just wish the cli documentation was a bit more fleshed out since SO much of the functionality resides within it.  Not to mention I haven't slept much in the last few days =)

thanks again,
Wes
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Thank again Jared, that cmdline string is exactly what I was looking for and the syntax example really helped me understand how to put together other similar queries.

Another question came to mind - is there a recommended method to export mailboxes to PST, since exmerge is no longer an option?

thanks!
Wes
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Wes, I'll track the message size limits setting you mentioned.

I'm not quite sure of the PowerShell question. Windows PowerShell itself is a separate release and I'm not going to speak for it. You can look at Windows PowerShell website for information. For Exchange, we are considering the Longhorn server support in a future release, and the Exchange Management Shell is built based on PowerShell.

For your situation copying a user, try to use param TemplateInstance for New-Mailbox to create a new mailbox. The new mailbox will be an exact duplicate of an existing mailbox, except a few mandatory settings which need to be specified. Such as:
New-Mailbox -TemplateInstance (Get-Mailbox <existingmailbox>)
Is this what you want? And for E2K7, we should not rely on ADSIEdit to edit something, if it cann't be done in cmdlets, please let us know.

For enabling or disabling attachments in OWA, we DO have the GUI. : ) Go to the console -> Server Configiration node -> Client Access subnode -> open the property dialog of owa (Default Web Site) vdir of Outlook Web Access tab -> see Public/Private Computer File Access page.

For the help information, besides the information available in the cmdline, please check out the Exchange Server Help doc which has more information.

Once again, thanks for the comments.
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Wes, you are welcome! you can refer to my recipient management one-liners post for more one-liners using PowerShell:
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/09/05/428833.aspx
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/09/18/428950.aspx

We are considering adding PST support to Export/Import-Mailbox in a future service pack. For now, Outlook is the thing we can use.

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Gotcha - I will check those out.

So when you say use Outlook, do you mean manually copy email folders etc into a PST, or is there a more automated way to do it in Outlook that I'm not aware of?

thanks!
Wes
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I have previously listed the progress we've been making in posting ITPro focused Systems Management blog
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Wes, I meant to open the mailbox in Oublook and use its File -> Import and Export menu to export the mailbox to a PST file.
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Thanks Jared, that will be helpful.

Honestly, a copy user in the gui is absolutely necessary.  Trying to duplicate users on the command line is ridiculous - it is driving us nuts as there are way too many settings to customize each time we do it (different OUs, different databases, etc).  Please consider adding this basic feature.
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Hi Jared,

I tried using the templateinstance code above again, and found that it does not copy a number of important AD attributes like Profile path, etc, so it's not really a replacement for the Copy User that we had the exchange2003-aware ADUC.  Unless I'm missing a parameter that tells exchange to copy these other attributes?

thanks,
Wes
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What do you back Exchange 2007 up with?  Backup Exec doesn't work.
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Todd,


NTBackup still works for streaming backups... and if your backup software does not work, I'd look for an update from the vendor. Also this might help in your search:

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/12/18/431930.aspx

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"2. Mailbox size is not an optional column or filter field in the console now, so we cann't add this column or sort the mailboxes by size in the console. Part of the reason is that mailbox size is one property horned by Store (returned by Get-MailboxStatistics), to retrieve this property along with other mailbox properties horned by AD (returned by Get-Mailbox) we need to access Store in addition to accessing AD, this could be a perf issue, expecially in case of a huge amount of mailboxes. "

Having to figure out cryptic command-line statements to do what should be a simple GUI function IS a performance issue.  Give me the column and let me use it or not use it depending on MY assessment, don't be patronizing and make the decision for me.  I am regretting transitioning from 2003 to 2007 because of the crippled GUI.
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"2. Mailbox Size...."  Powershell is good if I was a exchange and perhaps Windows Administrator but I am not.  At my "shop" I work on Windows, Exchange, Sharepoint, SQL,  Cisco (callmanager and IOS), ....and I could go on.  Going to the GUI save me a lot of time and brain power.  So please, for us poor admins that only have so much brain space for commands, please give me all the stuff the 2003 system manager had.  Please?
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