Recipient Types
Exchange Server 2003
supports different types of recipients depending on how you need to send
e-mail to a recipient and where that recipient is located in relation
to your Exchange organization. Recipient objects can be categorized into
four different types: user, contact, group, and public folder. The
first three types are configured and managed through the Active
Directory Users And Computers console, while public folders are created
using the Outlook client.
User Recipients
User recipients
are the recipient objects that represent employees and contractors who
work for your organization, and they are tied to Active Directory user
accounts. They can have e-mail addresses as part of the organization,
such as @contoso.com,
or they can have e-mail addresses external to the organization. These
recipient objects are configured through the Active Directory Users And
Computers console because they are user accounts in the Active Directory
domain. User recipients can be either mailbox-enabled or mail-enabled,
depending on your needs.
A mailbox-enabled user
is a user account that has a mailbox in the Exchange organization and,
as a result, can send and receive e-mail through the Exchange Server
2003 infrastructure. This type of user is typically a corporate employee
who logs on to the Active Directory domain with his domain user account
and accesses the Exchange Server 2003 server holding his mailbox
through the Outlook client (though there are other means by which a
mailbox can be accessed, such as with Outlook Web Access [OWA], Internet
Message Access Protocol 4 [IMAP4], and Post Office Protocol 3 [POP3]).
Mailbox-enabled users are the most common type of recipient object in an
Exchange organization.
Mail-enabled users
are similar to mailbox-enabled users in that they have domain user
accounts in the Active Directory domain. However, in contrast to a
mailbox-enabled user, a mail-enabled user does not have a mailbox in the
Exchange organization. Instead, a mail-enabled user has only an e-mail
address. In certain scenarios, you would want to make a user account
mail-enabled rather than mailbox-enabled. One such scenario is if you
have a contractor working onsite for your company who needs access to
the network (a domain user account) but does not need a corporate e-mail
account. In this situation, you could create a user account for the
contractor and mail-enable it, using the contractor’s personal e-mail
address through their Internet service provider (ISP). For example, if
there is a user account named Willis in the contoso.com domain, but his personal e-mail address is [email protected], you would mail-enable the user account and assign the [email protected]
address to the account. This allows Willis to appear in the Global
Address List (GAL) so he can be easily located by other employees and
contractors and added to distribution lists, and yet have his e-mail
sent to his personal account.
Another scenario in
which you would want to use mail-enabled users rather than
mailbox-enabled users is when you have offsite contractors working for
you who need to have corporate e-mail addresses but do not need access
to the network. For example, a publisher wants customers to be able to
send e-mail messages to an author at a corporate e-mail address, but the
author doesn’t work onsite for the company and never accesses the
corporate network. For instance, Lucerne Publishing employs freelance
writers for various contract assignments for its print and online
magazines. The company wants readers to be able to send e-mail to each
writer at e-mail addresses in the @lucernepublishing.com
domain. The freelance writers all have personal e-mail accounts, and
none have Active Directory user accounts for Lucerne. To solve the
problem of needing to have mail accounts for users that do not have user
accounts, the Exchange administrator at Lucerne would create
mail-enabled user accounts for each writer, disable the account (since
it won’t be used to access the network), and then forward the @lucernepublishing.com@lucernepublishing.com
domain that would be displayed publicly, yet e-mail addressed to the
account would be redirected to the writer’s personal account, such as
one with hotmail.com.
e-mail address to the personal address of the writer. Essentially, this
configuration allows the writer to have an e-mail address in the
Contact Recipients
A contact recipient
is similar to a mail-enabled user in that the e-mail address points to a
mailbox that is not a part of the Exchange organization. However,
contacts do not have user accounts in the Active Directory domain like
mail-enabled users do. You would typically use contact recipients when
users in your organization need to send mail to a particular address
outside the organization on a regular basis, and you want to provide the
convenience of making the address available in the GAL or available for
use in other Exchange Server address lists and distribution lists.
Contact recipients are similar to contacts stored in a user’s individual
Contacts folder. The difference is that with Exchange Server 2003, you
can make contacts available to the entire organization.
A common scenario
for using contact recipients is when two companies merge but have
separate Active Directory forests and Exchange organizations. In this
situation, it is necessary for employees in both organizations to
communicate with each other on a regular basis. For instance, if contoso.com and adatum.com merged, you could configure all of the users in adatum.com as contact recipients in the GAL of contoso.com and vice versa. This allows users in both Exchange organizations to communicate quickly and efficiently.
If you are migrating from
Exchange Server 5.5 to Exchange Server 2003, contact recipients map
directly to custom recipients in Exchange Server 5.5
Group Recipients
Group recipients
closely resemble mail-enabled users in that they can have e-mail
addresses that are a part of the Exchange organization, but they do not
have mailboxes that store e-mail. Where group recipients differ is that
when an e-mail message is sent to an address associated with the group,
everyone in the group receives the message. From a functionality
standpoint, this is the same as a distribution list in Exchange Server
5.5.
Because
of the integration with Active Directory, Exchange Server 2003 supports
mail-enabling both of the group types that Active Directory supports:
security groups and distribution groups. Security groups,
as the name implies, are used for assigning permissions to resources.
These are the domain local, global, and universal groups you use to
manage access to Active Directory resources. Distribution groups
have no relation to security or accessing resources and thus cannot be
assigned permissions. However, distribution groups are useful for
grouping users into a list related to some common purpose. For example,
you might have a distribution group that represents all your company’s
sales employees nationwide, a scenario where you typically would have a
number of security groups that contain all these users. Say you are
administering wideworldimporters.com
and you have offices in 20 U.S. cities, and each location is a separate
Active Directory site. You might have security groups for each location
in order to assign permissions. You can mail-enable each security
group, and e-mail [email protected] and [email protected],
and so on. If you want to send e-mail to all sales groups in a single
message, your options are to create another security group that contains
all the other groups (which would be unnecessary if you do not need to
assign security permissions to that national sales group) or to create a
distribution group that exists for e-mail purposes only, which is the
better choice.
Another situation in
which you would use distribution groups involves interdepartmental
groups or projects that require sending e-mail to groups of people who
don’t fit neatly into one or two security groups. By creating
distribution groups, you can easily group the users as desired without
having to consider network resource security issues.
Public Folder Recipients
Public folder recipients
are different from other recipient objects in that they are not
individual users or groups of users but rather a mail-enabled folder in
an Exchange organization. Users can be granted access to the public
folder through standard security permissions (individual or group) and
can access the public folder through the Outlook client by navigating
through the public folder hierarchy.
Public folder recipients
are used for a number of purposes, including discussion forums,
newsgroup postings, and creating a repository for customer feedback
e-mail. For example, you are the administrator for Contoso. Ltd., a
company that has just launched a new product line. As part of the
launch, marketing wants to be able to receive customer feedback. While
you can set up a distribution group, which will result in incoming
messages being sent to everyone in the group, a more ideal solution is
to mail-enable a public folder. This will result in all customer e-mail
sent to [email protected]
being posted to the folder, a single location where anyone who has been
granted permission to the folder can view the messages. This is
especially useful when people such as executive managers want to monitor
feedback but do not want to receive every customer e-mail in their
personal mailboxes.
Creating Recipient Objects
When you install
Exchange Server 2003, by default all Active Directory user accounts have
mailboxes created in the Exchange organization. However, if you have an
existing user that doesn’t have a mailbox, you can still mailbox-enable
the user after the fact. The Exchange Task Wizard is used to
mailbox-enable and to mail-enable users and groups.
When
you install Exchange Server 2003, Setup extends the Active Directory
Users And Computers management console to support Exchange Server
functionality. One way it does this is by adding another step to the
process of creating a user account. This step prompts you to create a
mailbox for the user, as shown in Figure 1.
By default, the check
box to create the mailbox is selected. If you want the user to be
mail-enabled instead, simply clear the box and finish the user creation
process as usual. If you do want to create the mailbox, leave the box
selected and verify that the default settings for Server and Mailbox
Store are correct. For Server, you can select any Exchange server in
your Exchange organization from the drop-down list. Exchange Server
2003, Enterprise Edition, supports creating multiple storage groups
(which hold mailbox stores) on a server, which is why you have the
option to select an alternate mailbox store.
Mail-enabling an
existing user account, group, or contact is accomplished using a
procedure similar to mailbox-enabling an account. Right-click the target
user, group, or contact in the Active Directory Users And Computers
console and select Exchange Tasks from the shortcut menu. The Exchange
Task Wizard starts. Depending on what you have previously configured for
the object, you’ll have a number of task choices, such as those shown
in Figure 2.
To
mail-enable an object, select Establish E-Mail Address from the task
list, and then click Next to continue. The next page of the wizard is
the Establish E-Mail Address page, shown in Figure 3, which displays the current mail properties of the object.
If you click Modify, you
will be prompted to choose the type of e-mail address you want to
create in the New E-Mail Address page, shown in Figure 4.
Your selection here will determine which configuration page will appear next. Figure 5 shows an example of configuring a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) address.
After you configure an address, the object will appear in the GAL for the Exchange organization.
