6. Creating Mail Contacts
There
are many times when an organization has the desire or need to
communicate with nonnative Microsoft messaging systems or external SMTP
addresses. When this situation occurs, it is an ideal opportunity to
utilize a mail contact.
For example, your
organization might regularly communicate with a client who has an email
account outside of your organization. So many of your users have a need
to communicate regularly with this user that you want to have them
included in your corporate email address book, but any messages sent to
them should go directly to their account outside of your organization.
Known
as a custom recipient in some older versions of Exchange, this
functionality has existed for some time, but the creation and
management process has changed slightly from revision to revision.
To create a mail contact in the Exchange Management Console, perform the following steps:
1. | Start the Exchange Management Console.
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2. | In the console tree, expand Recipient Configuration, and then select Mail Contact.
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3. | In the action pane, click New Mail Contact; this starts the New Mail Contact Wizard.
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4. | On
the Introduction page, you can select whether you are creating a new
contact, or choosing to mail-enable a contact that exists in your
organization but was previously not mail-enabled. For this instruction,
select New Contact, and then click Next to continue.
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5. | On the Contact Information page, fill out the following fields:
- Organizational Unit—
Use the Browse button to select the organizational unit where the
contact will reside. The default location is in the Users container.
- First Name, Initials, Last Name— Enter the appropriate information in these fields.
- Contact Name, Display Name, Alias— These
fields will be filled out by default based on the information entered
in the Name fields. You can change these settings to match your company
policies if needed.
- External E-Mail Address—
This is where you will enter the SMTP address for your mail-enabled
contact. Click Edit and enter the email address in the following
format: username@domain (example, [email protected]). Click OK to continue.
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6. | Click Next to continue.
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7. | Review the Configuration Summary, and click New to accept the current configuration and create the mail contact.
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8. | On the Completion page, review the summary and ensure the item was created without error. Click Finish to continue.
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Mail contacts can be created using the Exchange Management Shell by utilizing the new-mailcontact command. The following is s sample EMS command:
New-MailContact -ExternalEmailAddress:'SMTP:[email protected]'
-Name:'Test MailContact' -Alias:'Test_MailContact' -OrganizationalUnit:
'COMPANYABC.COM/Users' -DisplayName:'Test MailContact' -FirstName:'Test'
-Initials:'' -LastName:'MailContact'
Note
It is challenging to show the command in print with the proper formatting. For example, there is a space before –ExternalEmailAddress, -Name, -Alias,
and other arguments in the command. One easy way to get the proper
formatting is to create a new mail contact in the Exchange System
Manager, and then copy the Exchange Management Shell command that is
automatically generated and shown on the Completion page of the wizard.
Remember, you can select Ctrl+C to copy the contents of that page.
7. Managing Mail Contacts
After
a mail contact has been created, you can view the properties of the
object in the Exchange Management Console. Several settings are
available that you might want to configure for the contact. The most
commonly accessed settings are as follows:
General tab— You will find two options on the General tab that address display name and inclusion of the name in the address book.
Display Name—Located
at the top of the General tab, the display name is how the contact
appears in the Exchange Management Console and in the organization’s
address book. Changes made here are not reflected in the username in other fields of the contact.
Hide from Exchange Address Book—If you want to hide the contact from your organization’s address book, place a check mark here.
Contact Information tab— You can update the name of the user here, however, any changes are not
reflected in the display name. However, much of the information
contained on the Contact Information tab can be accessed by your user
community in Outlook.
Address and Phone tab—
Like the Contact Information tab, information in this section can be
accessed by your user community in Outlook. By selecting the contact
from the address book, users can view the contact’s address and phone
numbers if they are filled out on this page.
Organization tab—
The Organization tab enables you to document the contact’s title,
company, department, office, manager, and direct reports, if applicable.
Mail Flow Settings tab—
Arguably the most important of the configuration settings (next to the
SMTP address), the Mail Flow Settings tab allows you to configure
message size restrictions (a configurable receiving message size) and
message delivery restrictions (who the contact can receive mail from
and who it will reject messages from).
