User experience
You cannot manipulate the MailTips settings for a mailbox
through EAC or EMS, so clients display MailTips according to whatever
is available in the UI. If configured in cached Exchange mode, Outlook
depends on details of MailTips that are held with other recipient
attributes in the OAB, but when it is configured to work online,
Outlook fetches MailTips data from the Mailbox server, which is also
the way Outlook Web App works.
Figure 2
illustrates how Outlook 2013 and Outlook Web App display Mail Tips.
(MailTips are also supported in the same way by Outlook 2010, but the
necessary UI for MailTips is not included in Outlook 2007.) In this
example, the message is addressed to three groups, each of which
results in the display of a different MailTip. First, you are told that
you don’t have the necessary permission to send a message to the HR
Management group (because the group has been limited in terms of the
senders from which it will receive messages). Second, you see that
sending a message to Maple Leaf Lovers will result in delivery to 82
recipients, which is higher than the 25 limit set for the large
audience threshold. (An even larger group is used with Outlook Web
App.) Finally, sending the message to the CEO Office could be an
exercise in futility because the message will be moderated and might
not be accepted.
Configurable
options in Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 enable users to configure the
type of MailTips to see, whether to have the MailTips bar available at
all times, and whether to expand the MailTips bar if multiple tips are
available. For example, if your role involves the need to send messages
to large groups on a regular basis, you might decide that there is no
purpose in Outlook displaying this MailTip. Outlook Web App does not
include any user-controllable options to control how MailTips appear.
You
can add a custom MailTip to any mail-enabled object. Most commonly,
this is done for mailboxes that are not monitored to notify users that
their message might not be responded to quickly; to moderated
addresses; to restricted distribution groups (including dynamic groups)
that don’t accept messages from users who aren’t on an approved list;
and to provide some guidance to users when they send to special
mailboxes such as those used by help desks to set expectations about
when the sender might expect a response.
Custom MailTips can be
up to 175 characters. Given that many people are Twitter literate and
capable of expressing profound thoughts in 140 characters or fewer,
creating a suitable custom MailTip in 175 characters should not pose
any real difficulty in terms of composition. The only issue is knowing
where the limit exists. EAC does not attempt to count characters as you
enter a new MailTip and signals a problem only when you attempt to save
a MailTip that’s too long. It’s therefore a matter of trial and error
to perfect a MailTip. EMS is equally unhelpful.
Custom MailTips
are configured in exactly the same way as any other property for a
mail-enabled object. For example, to create a MailTip for a mailbox,
you use the Set-Mailbox cmdlet:
Set-Mailbox –Identity 'APJ Help Desk' –MailTip 'Messages to the APJ Help Desk are handled on a best-effort basis; please call 91184 if you need urgent support'
Use the same approach for a distribution group:
Set-DistributionGroup –Identity 'Sales' –MailTip 'Only members of the Sales Executives group can send to this address'
MailTips
are stored in Active Directory in HTML format. Therefore, you can input
HTML when you configure a custom MailTip. Being able to use HTML is
useful when you want to include a URL to point users to more
information. For example, messages sent to the help desk might include
a URL to enable users to log a support call:
Set-Mailbox –Identity 'EMEA Help Desk' –MailTip 'Please visit the Help Desk site <A href = "http://help-desk-support.contoso.com" </A> to log a support call'
MailTips
are stored as properties of the mailbox in Active Directory. The
Mailbox server reads the data hourly, so any change you make to a
custom MailTip can take up to an hour to become effective. The only way
to force a change to become effective earlier is to recycle Internet
Information Services (IIS), which is difficult in a production
environment.
Multilingual custom MailTips
Exchange 2013 accommodates multilingual organizations by
enabling you to create custom MailTips in all the languages you need to
support. This is a little more complex than setting a simple MailTip in
one language because first you must determine the list of languages,
translate the string into appropriate text for each language, and then
populate the array of translations by using the MailTipTranslations
parameter for each of the Set-Mailbox, Set-DistributionGroup,
Set-Contact, and Set-MailPublicFolder cmdlets as required. You have to
create a default MailTip before or when you add the translated values.
The default value is used whenever the language specified for a user
mailbox does not match a specific value in the list. In this example,
translated values were set for four languages in addition to the
English default. Each of the languages is separated by a comma.
Set-Mailbox –Identity 'Jacky Chen' –MailTip 'Financial Services Manager' –MailTipTranslations 'NL: Manager van de financiële Diensten', 'IT: Responsabile di servizi finanziari', 'FR: Directeur de services financiers', 'ES: Encargado de los servicios financieros'
The translated values are stored in the MailTipTranslations property as an array of HTML values. To see the values, type:
Get-Mailbox –Identity 'Jacky Chen' | Select MailTip* | Format-List
The MailTips functionality would be only a partial solution if
it only worked when users were connected online. Microsoft therefore
upgraded the OAB structure to include a new set of MailTips properties
for recipients that enables Outlook to process MailTips offline. The
properties are as follows:
All
these data, with the exception of the membership counts, are extracted
from Active Directory. Membership counts come from group metrics.
