#IIS Hacks

Server & System Administration Archive · 2007–2013

An independent, non-commercial archive. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any vendor named in these notes.

Exchange Server

The mail notes in this archive span three generations of Exchange Server — 2003, 2010 and 2013 — plus the Outlook symptoms that turn out, on inspection, to be server-side. They were written between 2007 and 2013 by someone running mail for small and mid-sized organisations, which shapes what is here: outbound delivery, spam, error codes, and reading headers to establish where a message actually went.

Why mail generated so many notes

Exchange in this period was the piece of infrastructure that failed most visibly. A slow file server is an annoyance; mail that does not leave the building is an incident, and it is noticed within minutes. So the notes are diagnostic and terse, and a striking number of them are named after an error code rather than a task — the numeric identifier was what an administrator actually had in hand when they went looking for an answer, and titling a post after it was how the answer got found.

The second theme is outbound mail, which is harder than it looks. Two of the archive's restored notes are the same job an Exchange generation apart: configuring Exchange 2010 to send external emails and configuring Exchange 2013 to send external email. Reading them together is instructive, because the underlying concept — a send connector with an address space and a source server — survives the version change while the interface used to create it does not. That is the general shape of everything in this section.

The third theme is spam, in both directions. Inbound filtering on Exchange 2003 and block-list handling account for several early notes; outbound reputation, and the SPF records that protect it, account for others. The SPF material is the one part of this section that has not aged at all, because the mechanism is still in use and still specified — the current specification is RFC 7208.

What has changed since

Exchange 2003 is long gone, and Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2013 have both reached end of support, so none of the version-specific procedures here should be treated as current. The management surface has changed more than the concepts: the Exchange Management Console was replaced by the web-based Exchange admin centre, and a great deal of what these notes do by clicking is now done in the shell. Microsoft's Exchange Server documentation is the current reference, and the product lifecycle pages record which versions are supported.

What still transfers is the diagnostic order: establish whether the message left the organisation before touching anything on the server, read the headers rather than the symptom description, and treat a delivery failure as a routing question first and a configuration question second. The header-reading note remains the most generally useful thing in this section for exactly that reason.

Several notes here overlap with other subjects — client-side Outlook faults also appear under Windows and Server, and the spam and block-list material sits close to Security, Viruses, Trojans.

Notes filed under Exchange Server

Linked titles are restored pages. Plain titles are a record of what was published at that URL; the full corpus is indexed in the complete post archive.

  • 18 May 2007 — Exchange Server 2003 Spam Filtering
  • 18 May 2007 — Spamhaus Spam List Update
  • 19 May 2007 — Shutting Down Exchange Server Faster
  • 5 June 2007 — Exchange Server Reported Error 0x8004010F
  • 5 June 2007 — Large Exchange Server Performance Tip
  • 5 June 2007 — Exchange Server Reported Error 0x8004011D
  • 7 June 2007 — SPF Records for Windows Email Servers
  • 12 June 2007 — Resolve Exchange Server 2000 Error 80004005
  • 23 September 2007 — Email Address Specifications
  • 18 November 2007 — How to View Email Headers in Common Email Programs
  • 19 November 2007 — Outlook 2003 Auto-Complete Cache History List
  • 20 November 2007 — Outlook Error 0x80040154
  • 25 January 2008 — Outlook Print Margins Cut Off
  • 23 March 2008 — HTTPS over RPC with Outlook 2003 / 2007
  • 28 March 2008 — Outlook Web Access Out of Office Assistant
  • 18 January 2009 — Word Crashes on Exit / Hangs on Word Attachments in Outlook
  • 9 November 2009 — Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Released, and the Trial
  • 11 August 2010 — Configure Exchange 2010 to send external emails
  • 26 April 2013 — Configure Exchange 2013 to send external email