Proventing issues with Duplicate mailboxes.

Question

Hi,
I'm looking at automatically creating mailboxes when new users are created, We have a large amount of users with the same name (as accounts are based on first name.surname) and obviously don't want to create issues with duplicate email addresses.
How do i have the creation process to check if the address already exists in exchange and add a prefix to the address before completion?

Regards
Thomas

Answer 1

Hello Thomas,

How do you generate mail aliases? If you generate aliases based on the User Logon Name (samAccountName) property, it is always unique, so all aliases generated based on that property will also be unique. Additionally, you can use a PowerShell script that will automatically change the user's logon name, if it is not unique. Take a look at Example 2 in step 5 of the Validate/Modify User Input Using a Script Tutorial for instructions on hot to accomplish the task.

Comments

Hi,
Thanks for the quick reply,
We have a unique account name in AD (all numbers) but the email address are based on the users first name.surname which is a polciy in exchange.
What we want to do is to add a assending number to the end of the email address i.e thomas.cunningham1@emailaddress.com if the name is not unique.
Hope that makes sense.
Thomas

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Actually, this job is already done by the Exchange provisioning engine. Here's what Microsoft has to say about this:

When the Exchange proxy address engine stamps an SMTP address, it determines whether a duplicate SMTP address exists. If a duplicate SMTP address exists, the proxy address engine appends a number to the end of the SMTP address and then checks again.

If you want some more detail, take a look at this article by Microsoft: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2583860/en-us.

So, I think, you can rely on Exchange with this issue ;)