Provide auto configuration for your mail services

When you use exchange with outlook then the client configuration works almost magically.
This is also possible for non-exchange mail servers.

The simplest solution is the new software called automx
Together with two entries in your dns you get automatic configuration.

The system covers automatic configuration for Outlook and Thunderbird (and all others using the same configuration discovery).
You specify what pop/imap/smtp services should be used and what ports and ssl/tls encryption should be used as default.

We at aarboard have now enabled this autodiscovery service for all our client domains.

Setting dbremote mail replication options via isql in SQL Anywhere

When you extract databases from a SQL Anywhere server you can then enter the mail settings on first run of dbremote.

When you are running dbremote as a service (under either linux or windows) then you will not see the dialog asking for the mail settings.

To prevent this you can enter the parameters via normal sql commands.
Here a example on how to configure the mail replication (smtp+pop3)

set remote smtp option smtp_host='smtp.domain.com'

set remote smtp option pop3_host='pop.domain.com'

set remote smtp option pop3_userid='mailaccount@domain.com'

set remote smtp option pop3_password='password'

SMTP SSL in Exchange 2007/2010

In exchange 2007 and higher, the default connector are configured to accept passwords only when using a secured connection (Like SSL or TLS).
A good idea
, but...

The SSL option is only available for POP and IMAP, on SMTP you miss this option, here you can only configure a TLS secured connection.

Not a problem.... do you think?
When you still have users accessing your mail server via POP3/SMTP with MS Outlook 2003 (Not uncommon these days) then they don't have the option to use SMTP with TLS, only SMTP with SSL is available...

Other products from the same company not offering SMTP with TLS are: Outlook Express, Windows Mail....

So you will either have to upgrade all clients to a new MS Office version, or downgrade security on your exchange server and allow the SMTP connector to also accept password over unsafe connections.

Or, probably the best thing to do: Just switch to a real mail user agent like thunderbird.....

Migration of MS SBS 2003 to MS SBS 2011

Microsoft has a good document about the steps to migrate a SBS 2003 server to SBS 2011.
It is normally easy and well documented. But as always, there are things not working es expected or documented.

Here a few things:

Migration fails when joining the domain (dcpromo)

• When installing the new server it should automatically join the old domain
• If that join fails, then the migration wizard shows a fatal error and tells you to restart with the whole installtion. (Of course at this point you already had waited about 1-2 hours)
• When you google (or bing) arround, you will see that a "recovery" of the setup process is still possible. Look here for more details.
• One problem might be, that your migration account (usually the Administrator) is using a weak password, one not meeting 2008R2 complex password rules
• Another might be, that your migration user is not member of all required groups

DHCP reservations are not migrated

• Yep, can occure, sometimes it works, sometimes not
• In that case export the leases from the old server and then either add them manually on the new server. See here how to do it almost automatically

After mailbox migration to the new server, the mailboxes are not available and/or the owa shows just a empty screen after login

• Make sure the all required exchange services are running (For example the "MS Exchange RPC Client" is one to not correctly autostart after a server reboot

Other potential MS exchange migration issues

• Access to smtp, pop and imap is no longer allowed with plain text passwords. So you should confiure your clients to use either POP/IMAP with (start)tls or/and with SSL
• IMAP and POP3 connectors are not started by default, you have to enable these services in the service manager
• For external SMTP access to your server (for non-outlook users) it is best to create a SMTP connector on Port 587 (Submission port), that way you can prevent problems when your ISP blocks connections to the standard smtp port
  

Fax migration

• You still have to configure the fax service on the new server before doing the fax migration

Allow SMTP users to send emails in Exchange 2010

When you need to integrate normal email clients in a exchange 2010 environment, you probably get problems with sending mails to the outside world.

To solve this you normaly do the following:

1. Create SMTP connector your users will use for sending mails
2. This connector must require user authentication

So in normal environments this would be enough to start sending mails.
But unfortunally Exchange does still return a error message like:

"550 5.7.1 Client does not have permission to send as this sender"

To solve this, you have to allow all authenticated users to send mails via this connector.
This can be done via the Exchange shell with this command:

Add-AdPermission -Identity "MySMTPConnector" -User "NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users" -ExtendedRights ms-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Any-Sender

Unfortunally non-english servers just won't find the corresponding group, since it is named differently (Read localized)
To find out the correct group name you can use this command:

Get-Adpermission -Identity "MySMTPConnector" | format-table -view identity

For a german installation the corresponding group is "NT-AUTORITÄT\Authentifizierte Benutzer"

So the final command for the german exchange server is:

Add-AdPermission -Identity "MySMTPConnector" -User "NT-AUTORITÄT\Authentifizierte Benutzer" -ExtendedRights ms-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Any-Sender