January 31, 2020

Bulk deletion of an email from mailboxes

I have been an Exchange administrator. (And I have fond memories of those days.) Exchange is often an overlooked, underappreciated aspect of Enterprise IT administration. Of course, this is 2020, and we are steadily moving away from emails, replacing it with the likes of Teams, Slack, Wire and what not. I had read an article a long time ago (which I cannot find anymore) that pointed out the inherent flaws in emails; emails were never meant to be secure.

January 15, 2020

Updating a distribution list with error handling

This morning I woke up to a query whether we could do a bulk addition of users (with email addresses) to a distribution list. The team got a list of users to add and the name of the distribution group as part of the request. The administrators would then copy-paste the email column to a new CSV file, place the file on the desktop and run a one-liner. Import-Csv "C:\Users\USER88398\Desktop\book1.csv" | ForEach-Object { Add-DistributionGroupMember "DL-DistributionGroup070818" -Member $_.

January 21, 2019

Distribution Group clean-up using PowerShell

One of the downsides of old environments is the scope (and necessity) for clean-up. It often happens that there are more groups in an environment than users. And it is certainly not uncommon. In today’s post, we look at a small distribution group clean-up project in Microsoft Exchange. How to go about the project Safe clean-up Address DL redundancy Further clean-up Summing up I once embarked on such a project in an environment that had over three thousand groups, but only two thousand users.

January 7, 2019

Exchange database inventory using PowerShell

With the new year come new resolutions. Oh, I was talking about the site. PowerShell Pro will now show some PowerShell scripts that would help you with automation. Today’s automation snippet is all about getting an inventory of all mailboxes in your Microsoft Exchange environment. Here are the topics covered in this post: The output of the script/function The script itself How it works Extending the script Microsoft Exchange is one of those systems whose management almost completely relies on PowerShell.