Send4Help

I ran into a user today who kept receiving a prompt in Outlook that her quota had been surpassed.  The Helpdesk looked at it and found that she had a huge amount of data in the Calendar folder within her mailbox.

It turns out she had a couple pesky recurring meetings which had attachments.  And it turned out she’d inadvertently duplicated said meetings.

So the combination of several years of weekly recurrence, two attachments, and duplicates caused the innocent meeting which was only a megabyte or two to cause her mailbox, and everyone invited to the meeting, to balloon to several gigabytes in size.

I located the problematic meetings by viewing the user’s calendar using MCFMAPI, however, I believe it could also be done by simply opening the user’s calendar, changing the view to All Appointments, and sorting by recurrence and meetings with attachments.  Then all it takes is to Send Cancellation on each “bad” meeting.

When writing a new email in Outlook and you also use Microsoft Communicator, Outlook can display the current status in real time of the people you are writing to.

If Outlook is not displaying the status like it should, check the following option:

Outlook 2007:

• Tools
• Options
• Other tab
• Check the box next to “Display online status next to a person name”

Outlook 2010:

• File
• Options
• Contacts
• Check the box next to “Display online status next to name”

This occurred today when attempting to run handheldcleanup.exe –u on our BES server.  It occurred because when prompted for the BES server name:

Please Enter BESName: ->

An incorrect name was typed in.

To locate the name which should be input, verbatim, I looked Blackberry Server Configuration, on the Blackberry Server tab.  It should provide the server name next to “Blackberry Server Name”

Having some trouble getting the Taskbar to move in Windows Vista?

Already exhausted the tried and true Drag/Drop method?

Try removing the Quick Launch toolbar from the Taskbar and then try moving it.

Today I received this error message when attempting to view topology information via Exchange Management Console –> Server Configuration –> Mailbox

ERROR: Could not connect to the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service on server servername.domain.net.  One of the following problems may be occurring: 1– The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service is not running.  2– There is no network connectivity to server servername.domain.net. 3- You do not have sufficient permissions to perform this command.  The following permissions are required to perform this command: Exchange View-Only Administrator and local administrators group for the target server.  4- Credentials have been cached for an unpriviledged user.  Try removing the entry for this server from Stored User Names and Passwords.

Here is a screenshot of the error:

I’d also receive this error when attempting to move a mailbox from one information store to another:

MapiExceptionNetworkError: Unable to make admin interface connection to server.

(hr=0×80040115, ec=-2147221227)

So I checked:

- The Information Store Service was started.
- I’d been logging on with the same administrator account I normally used.
- I’d checked saved credentials using Start –> Run –> control keymgr.dll – and there we none stored.

Resolution:

I normally use a program called mRemote to RDP into the servers I normally interact with.  It allows you to input and save connection info and credentials for each hostname/server you connect to.  Each server RDP session can be opened with a double click in a new tab (like a web browser).

Well, I recently reset the password on my administrator account.  However, I forgot to update the password mRemote had stored for me to login to the mailbox server.

Consequently, I was logging into the mailbox server using an older password which was cached.  I logged out, and logged back in using my current/new password and the problem was resolved!

In case one of Gmail’s experimental Labs breaks your Gmail, do not fear!  Gmail can be launched in “safe mode” using the URL:

http://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0#

Rebuilding a Windows user profile is an old “cure-all” trick used to troubleshoot various logon problems, such as profile errors, unreasonably slow logon, or to restore Windows user settings to first-time-use defaults.

In Windows XP, it was possible  to simply rename C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME folder to .OLD, for example, in order to rebuild a user’s Windows profile.  However, performing the same steps in Vista will create a TEMP user folder instead of a fresh profile.

This solution is a little risky if you are not familiar with the registry, so only attempt if you’re comfortable making direct modifications to the Windows registry.

1. Click Start

2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
a. Look at each folder that starts with S-1-5-21
i. In each folder there are two values you are looking for
1. Guid-contains another unique numeric identifier
2. ProfileImagePath-contains the path C:\Users\username

3. Once you have found the unique ID for the user, in the same directory as ProfileList there are two other folders, ProfileGuid and PolicyGuid.
a. Open each folder and look for the Guid found in ProfileList and delete that folder.

4. After deleting the folders out of ProfileGuid and PolicyGuid, delete the user’s unique ID from ProfileList

5. Move the user’s folder from C:/Users to the C: drive.

6. After replacing the new folder with the new one, you will have to replace My Documents, Desktop, and Favorites.

Today we experienced a significant onslaught of spam/phishing email into our organization which was not caught by our spam filters.  Luckily, we were able to manually create filters which stopped any additional incoming instances of this attack.

I was approached by our IT Security department to run a “seek and destroy” on the emails which were able to make it through before our blocks were in place.

First, we ran message tracking on the Exchange servers to identify the users who received the malicious email, then exported said users to a .CSV file which was formatted like so:

Name
spamrecipient1@company.com
spamrecipient2@company.com
spamrecipient3@company.com
spamrecipient4@company.com
spamrecipient5@company.com

We can then run an export-mailbox to pull emails with certain keywords from the list of mailboxes in the .CSV we created above.  In this example we used “Reset your Company.com password”.

import-csv "d:\scripts\spamrecipients.csv" | ForEach-object -process {Get-mailbox $_.name | export-mailbox -targetmailbox PhishingCleanupMailbox -targetfolder Phishing -subjectKeyWords "Reset your Company.com password" -deletecontent -confirm:$false -maxthreads 8}

This will scan each mailbox in the .CSV for emails containing the keyword specified, and move them to the mailbox “PhishingCleanupMailbox”, create a folder called “Phishing”, then a subfolder called “Recovered Items – Mailboxname”.  Under Recovered Items, it will re-create the folder structure of the original mailbox.  So wherever the original email was located in the original mailbox, it will be located in the same folder in the Recovered Items.

To view the internet / message header in Outlook 2010:

1. Open the e-mail for which you wish to see the internet header information.

2. Click File

3. Click Info

4. Click Properties

Alternatively, you can also add a button to show Internet Headers to the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) at the top of the e-mail window.

To do so:

1. Click the small down arrow in the top left of the main window of an open e-mail.

2. Click “More Commands”

3. Click the “Choose commands from” dropdown menu and set it to “Commands Not in the Ribbon”

4. Select “Message Options…” and click Add

5. Click Ok!  In the main window of an opened e-mail, you should now see:

I received a request to have someone “CC’d” on all meeting invitations sent to a conference room in Outlook.  To accomplish this, I simply created a mail profile in Outlook as the calendar (can also be done through OWA) and created a Rule to forward all meeting invitations and updates to the requested recipient.

To create the rule in Outlook:

1. Click Tools –> Rules and Alerts –> New Rule
2. Choose “Check Messages When They Arrive”
3. Check the box “which is a meeting invitation or update”
4. Click Next
5. Select either “forward it to people or distribution list” or “forward it to people or distribution list as an attachment” (see below)

Now, you have two options here.  One being to forward a copy of the meeting invitation.  The other being to forward a copy of the meeting invitation as an attachment.  Either option works, but when you choose to only forward a copy of the meeting invitation (not as an attachment), Exchange will notify the meeting Organizer that the meeting notice has been forwarded, and to whom it was forwarded.  So if you don’t want Organizers to know that their meetings are being forwarded, opt for the forward it to people or distribution list as an attachment route.

6. Click “people or distribution list” and define the person to receive the forwarded meeting invitation.

7. Next –> Finish