Believe it or not, the MSP I work for still has a client who
is using Exchange 2003 as their primary email service. Despite several attempts
at convincing them of the power of Office 365, they refuse to migrate. Last
week the CFO contacted me and requested we provide them with a report of all
users who have their email forwarded to another mailbox. “Ok, no problem.” I
said helpfully as the client informed me of their request (at the time I didn’t
even think about them having Exchange 2003…). I figured I would just connect to
their server and do some quick PowerShell magic, and that would be it. Quick and
painless, right? Wrong.
I did the RDP dance and got connected to their server, and
my jaw just about hit the floor when I couldn’t find the Exchange Management
Shell! I asked around the office to see if any of the other guys could help, but
no one knew what to do. However, after talking with one of the guys, I
remembered that this is Active Directory we are dealing with. There are
objects, and those objects have attributes. The mailboxes/user accounts are
objects, and those objects have attributes. So what attribute is it that
controls forwarding addresses? I manually found one of the users who had a
forwarding address configured. Then I opened up Active Directory Users and
Computers, opened up her account properties, and went to the Attribute Editor
tab. I filtered for attributes that have values and was able to see the email
address that her mail was forwarding to. This was the “altRecipient” attribute.
I then did an “Advanced” search in Active Directory Users
and Computers for any objects that have the “altRecipient” attribute
configured, like so:
This search showed me all of the mailboxes that have an alternate
recipient (forwarding address) configured. Not sure if there is another way to
obtain this information, but this is the way that worked for me. Hopefully this
article is able to help someone in the same situation.
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