How to clear the Discovery Holds folder
To find whether this discovery holds folder is completely full, use the below-mentioned command. Step 1: Connect-ExchangeOnline and then, Step 2: Get-MailboxFolderStatistics -Identity user | select name,foldersize Note: This DiscoveryHolds folder is having a limit of 100 GB. If it is full, we will get issues like "Unable to clear deleted items folder", "deleted items are getting auto-restored" etc., One of the reasons for this folder is full: If Organization Hold is turned on(All Exchange mailboxes are selected in Compliance Retention Policy) or the Individual ID is selected on Compliance Retention Policy. Solution: Please try the below-mentioned steps to overcome this issue. Step 1: Exclude the DiscoveryHolds full ID in the Compliance Retention policy or run the below-mentioned commands in PowerShell. Connect-IPPSSession and then, Set-RetentionCompliancePolicy -Identity "Compliance Retention Policy Name" -AddExchangeLocationException user for multiple users, Set-RetentionCompliancePolicy -Identity "Compliance Retention Policy Name" -AddExchangeLocationException user1, user2, user3 Now on PowerShell, Connect-ExchangeOnline and then, Set-Mailbox -Identity user -RetainDeletedItemsFor 0 and then run the below-mentioned command two times. Start-Managedfolderassistant -Identity user Start-Managedfolderassistant -Identity user After 2-3 minutes, run the below-mentioned commands. Get-Mailbox "user" | FL DelayHoldApplied,DelayReleaseHoldApplied If the output is received as true for any above-mentioned holds, then run the below-mentioned commands. Set-Mailbox user -RemoveDelayHoldApplied Set-Mailbox user -RemoveDelayReleaseHoldApplied and then run the below-mentioned command two times. Start-Managedfolderassistant -Identity user Start-Managedfolderassistant -Identity user After 2-3 minutes, this DiscoveryHolds folder will become zero as per the below-mentioned screenshot. This process helped me a lot. If you have any doubts/concerns/suggestions about this post, please comment below. Best Regards, Venkat Kiran Kona.BIMI Logos – Another Way to Stop Email Spoofing
Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) is a new industry effort to help identify email from reputable companies by displaying their logo alongside email (and potentially other items) in applications. https://office365itpros.com/2018/12/06/bimi-office365/Exchange Professsional Career Profile: Adnan Rafique
I had the pleasure of interviewing Adnan Rafique, one of our newest Office Servers and Services MVPs specializing in Exchange and Windows Server. Adnan is a self-made IT Pro who has invested in his own career and won many accolades for his community work. To read more about his journey, take a look at the interview here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/IT-Resources-Training/Cloud-Careers-Friday-Feature-Adnan-Rafique/m-p/58659#M133
Legacy/Modern Distribution Lists Enhancement
This question is mainly to Microsoft. I was wondering if MS could introduce a feature where in Distribution List/Security Groups or any other modern groups would have option to renew yearly. DL's some time grow rapidly that become very cumbersome job to cleanup. As soon as DL nears expiry an automated mail should be sent to Owner asking if DL needs to be renewed? if not then DL will be expired. Just my 2 cents.Microsoft Hybrid Agent for Exchange Server is now available for preview!
The much-anticipated Microsoft Hybrid Agent for Exchange Server is now available for preview! We spoke about the Hybrid Agent back at Microsoft Ignite 2018, so feel free to catch up on what was discussed in Orlando here. The Hybrid Agent was designed to remove some of the existing challenges customers face today when establishing a Hybrid Exchange environment. This includes, adding external DNS entries, updating certificates, and allowing inbound network connections through the firewall, and much, much more. See the announcement on the Exchange blog for more information.Demystifying Certificate Based Authentication with ActiveSync in Exchange 2013 and 2016 (On-Premises
Some of the more complicated support calls we see are related to Certificate Based Authentication (CBA) with ActiveSync. This post is intended to provide some clarifications of this topic and give you troubleshooting tips. What is Certificate Based Authentication (CBA)? Instead of using Basic or WIA (Windows Integrated Authentication), the device will have a client (user) certificate installed, which will be used for authentication. The user will no longer have to save a password to authenticate with Exchange. This is not related to using SSL to connect to the server as we assume that you already have SSL setup. Also, just to be clear (as some people have those things confused) CBA is not two-factor authentication (2FA). How does the client certificate get installed on the device? There’s several MDM (Mobile Device Management) solutions to install the client certificate on the device. The most important part of working with CBA is to know where the client certificate will be accepted (or ‘terminated’). How you implement CBA will depend on the response to following questions: Will Exchange server be accepting the client certificate? Will an MDM or other device using Kerberos Constrained Delegation (KCD) be accepting the client certificate? Learn more on the Exchange blog.Migrate traditional Distribution Groups to Office 365 Groups
Over the past few months, customers are increasing both the number of Office 365 Groups created and average monthly usage. It’s great to see customers getting value out of the service. If you are using Office 365 and haven’t yet moved traditional Distribution Groups (also known as Distribution Lists or DLs) over to Office 365 Groups, here are a few of the advantages of making the move. Read more on the https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2016/08/18/migrate-traditional-distribution-groups-to-office-365-groups/.User Profile Analysis for Exchange Servers (Who needs the Exchange Profile Analyzer?)
Hey All, some years ago Neil Johnson had written an article about Exchange Sizing without the usage of the Exchange Profile Analyzer. Within the article was a script that is used to collect the data needed for a proper sizing: - messages sent per mailbox per day - messages received per mailbox per day - average message size Note: This information is vital for performing good quality Exchange Server scaling. After Neil has changed the position in MS I will try to maintain the script and the article for the future. And now to the technical stuff: One of the nice things since Exchange 2007 is that we can interrogate the message tracking logs via PowerShell. This provides us with a nice way to query what the Exchange Server is doing. Usefully the message tracking logs include sufficient information for us to approximate our user profile data. The author of this script is Rob Campbell, more about the scripts development can be found here… http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2011/03/02/use-powershell-to-track-email-messages-in-exchange-server.aspx The script is maintained now at https://github.com/msftmroth/MessageStats The script basically works by parsing the messaging tracking logs of your Exchange Servers and then tabulates the information into a CSV file for analysis in Excel. To provide some data to parse I configured a loadgen test against 10 mailboxes with a heavy profile, this should approximate to around 80 messages received and 20 sent per user. The MessageStats script has a single command line parameter which controls how many days back it will look in the tracking logs. The script only parses a single days worth of data, the value you provide define in the script which day to process, so 1 will process yesterdays logs. Now we have our CSV file that we can open in Microsoft Excel, however the data required some work before we can get our EPA values. The following screenshot shows the raw data open in Excel. 1. Highlight cell A1 2. Press CTRL+SHIFT+END 3. Click on the INSERT Menu 4. Click on the TABLE button 5. Click on OK 6. Open the DESIGN Menu 7. Check the "Total Row" checkbox 8. Hide columns C,D,E,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,R,S,T,U You should now have a table with the following columns… - Date - User - Received Total - Received MB Total - Sent Unique Total - Sent Unique MB Total Note: Due to my test lab being very small I have added a filter to remove any non-loadgen accounts from the data analysis. In the Total row at the bottom of your table add "AVERAGE" subtotals for "Received Total" and "Sent Unique Total". In the "Received MB Total" column total cell, add in an "AVERAGE" subtotal, then edit the formula in the cell and divide that value by the Total Row average for "Received Total", then multiply the result by 1024 – this will report the average message size in KB. In the "Sent Unique MB Total" column total cell, add in an "AVERAGE" subtotal, then edit the formula in the cell and divide that value by the Total Row average for "Sent Unique Total", then multiply the result by 1024 – this will report the average message size in KB. We now have all of the information that we require… - Messages Received per Mailbox Per Day = Received Total = 68 - Messages Sent per Mailbox Per Day = Sent Unique Total = 17 - Average Message Size = Average of Received MB Total & Sent Unique MB Total (27.37+28.5)/2 = 27.94KB So, using this technique we have managed to approximate our user profile to a fair degree of accuracy without needing to logon to any mailboxes! I suspect that this method is accurate to around +/- 10% which is totally acceptable in this context. Obviously there is a caveat here that I have only performed some rudimentary testing in a fairly small lab environment, so if you do run this in production and find that it generates weird results, or that it validates your already proven EPA data, then feel free to drop me a note to let me know. Thanks to FrankPlawetzki for checking Shortcut for this post: http://aka.ms/NoEPA
