Do you enjoy the "Tip of the day" that EMS gives you whenever you open it up? Something like

Ever wanted to retrieve a list of all available tips? It's pretty easy. Just type

1..200 | foreach {get-tip -local:$_}

This will give you an output of all available Tips in the EMS.

Enjoy!

It's been a long time since my last post, but i thought i can use some of my christmas spare time to revitalize the blog. Today i want to talk about an odd issue that i helped one of customer with.

The goal was to implement a transport rule that will add a disclaimer to every OUTGOING mail only. Running Exchange 2010, this should be a piece of cake so the customer configured something like that:

Sounds about right, doesnt it? Sure enough, the rule didn't fire and wasn't applied to the outgoing messages. We checked the usual suspects like replication, transport service not aware of any change etc, but everything looked proper. Being rather stomped by the issue, i decided to go for ExTRA tracing to capture an .etl of the rules engine while processing outgoing emails.

The .etl revealed that the transport service was fully aware of the new transport rule, but for whatever reason didn't recognize outgoing mails as "outgoing", but rather treated them as internal.

Futher tracing revealed that the rules engine considered the "Default Remote Domain"-entry in the remote domains as internal, and therefore didnt apply the disclaimer rule and just bypassed it.

While looking into the issue, i discovered the following -

Notice how it says IsInternal:$true for the Default Remote Domain? This tells Exchange, in our special case the transport rules engine, to treat all mails going to an address space of * as internal, hence not to apply the disclaimer. We changed it backed to the default setting of false - and voila, disclaimers are being successfully applied.

Case closed!