old employee email addresses 5

[coch]

I have loads of ex employees who had at some point in their lives registered on various web sites and I now get about 350 emails daily addressed to them! I have blocked the senders from sending some of the stuff but as usual senders just change their details. Is there a way of blocking incoming mail addresses to my old employees ?

 

[Drwugong]

What you could do is create a new user called ex-employee. Add all the SMTP addresses of your EX users to this account, so you'll have loads of external email addresses associated to this user account - leave the ex-employee@yourcompany.com address as the primary address though.

Sign on as the new user and set up an out off office reply - in mine I explain that they no longer work for us, and if you need to speak to a member of staff they should contact reception on 123-123-1234.

Periodically you can just empty the mailbox. Hope this is of some help!

cheers

Aaron

 

[gcdhnjgfhfgsxh]

Hi

I agree with 'no1going' however just to add what has been suggested, i would also put a limit on the storage space. for example prohibit send and recieve when mail box hits 10mb for example. Mails from the external contacts will be rejected eventually. that way you coule more or less just forget aboutt he account rather than going in and clearing it out every day or so. eventually people will get the message that the person doesnt work there or they will just get tired as the message recieved back will say that their mail box if full and hey are not recieving it.

Hope this helps

dave

http://affy.dynu.net

 

[SteveTheGeek]

I've tried that last one, and the only catch is that once the account hits the limit and starts rejecting, the postmaster account once again starts seeing undeliverables as a result. I've got a "bit-bucket" account that takes in the spam going to ex-employees, and I find that actually reviewing the email (in a separate mailbox in my Outlook client) occasionally turns up one that is legitimate. The problem with the out-of-office reply is that you then start seeing outbound undeliverables TO the spammer.
-Steve

 

[coch]

Thanks for all of your suggestions, I currently have a system like this inplace, but I was hoping that I could utilize a setup like the filtering to block peoples address.

 

[esmithbda]

We have a similar issue here. A combination of old employees, as well as addresses that were never employees in the first place (either someone filled out a form with a nonsense user at our domain, or some spam just makes it up).

I have turned off the auto-response of delivery failure notification in the Exchange System manager, but tracking our spam collection, I can see that it is still is sending out non-delivery notifications... so I'm at a loss on that one.

I would love the ability for Exchange to say "if there is mail coming in and it isn't to a user that exists on our server, then just drop it at the door and don't do anything at all with it" - but that doesn't seem to be the case on ours, even after I've toyed with the settings.

I even setup an EventSink to drop all mail that comes in to certain users, but even that seems to fail (well, not fail, but it apparently gets triggered too late and the non-delivery messages are already sent out).

 

[SteveTheGeek]

esmithbda,
The only problem I can think of is that someone sending an email to one of your users transposes a letter in the email address, then doesn't get a bounceback saying it wasn't delivered, and then rages that so-and-so (the intended recipient) ignored them, and you've got no way of showing that it wasn't delivered. That's the worst-case scenario, but I would rather burden my Exchange server a little more rather than get into customer-service problems.
-Steve

 

[mmaxx]

Create a blackhole mailing list with multiple smtp addresses of your ex-employees.

blackhole = distribution list with no members and any mail sent to this object will just disappear like through a blackhole

 

[littlebuddy]

Why don't you just delete the ex-employees?

 

[Davetoo]

That's not the problem. The problem is these web sites are sending emails to the ex-employee's non-existant mailboxes, and NDR's are being generated.

I'm Certifiable, not certified.
It just means my answers are from experience, not a book.

 

[nolacoaches]

I do it by setting up a Public Folder called Dead Letter Box. I have retention set to one day if I want to periodically review it. When someone leaves the company I farward their mail to someone their supervisor designates for a month, then I add their name to the Dead Letter Box, delete their mailbox and forget about them. All the endless spam gets processed without my attention and without generating or receiving a lot of NDR's.

 

[dbredes]

Okay..similar situation...New Exchange Server...Several old users..(which I think were not necessarily real people) were set up on old server..Not set up on new...All they get is spam...Lots of NDRS..

Don't want to add user...and have to clean out..all the time..Like blackhole idea but need more detailed instructions...

In Server Manager
1) Add new mailing list called blackhole...

Can anyone complete this...Thank you in advance...

 

[gmcdonnell]

Steps to follow to create a blackhole:

1. In the Active Directory Users and Computers app (which is found under Start / Programs / Administrative Tools on your domain controller) create a mail-enabled Universal Distribution Group. Do not add any members to the group.

2. Go to the properties of this Distribution Group. In the tab "E-mail Addresses" add the SMTP addresses of the ex-employees.

3. Mail sent to these addresses will be "distributed" to no one, since the distribution group is empty. In the process the messages will be deleted and no space will be consumed in the database.

Good luck!

Gary McDonnell

 

[CCFAdmin]

I have a similar issue and I like the blakc hole idea....

But a friend asked me "Why don't you just not have the undelivered messages come to you?" In essense allow an undeliverable to those sending to an address that is no longer valid.

Good question... any thoughts?

Does it not create a log in the bad mail folder? Would this eventually fill out or is it purged when a full backup of exchange is run.

Thanks
Charles

 

[xmsre]

Another twist would be to mail enable a public folder and use it instead of an actual mailbox. Add the ex-employees' email addresses to the mail enabled public folder. You don't need multiple replicas, just one is fine. Then you could set item aging for, say 7 days, and be done with it.

John
MOSMWNMTK

 

[austinringding]

i am trying to enact the 'blackhole' method as described by gmcdonnell and am running into problems with step 2.

i have created a universal mail enabled distribution group in domain.local and then i go into Properties/Email Addresses tab to add the addresses of my ex-employees and i get the following error when trying to add their SMTP addresses:

This email address already exists in this organization.
Id no: c10312e7
Microsoft Active Directory-Exchange Extension

am i doing something wrong here? advice?

TIA

 

[SteveTheGeek]

austinringding,
You need to delete the email addresses of the ex-employees in their regular user accounts, and then wait a little bit (an hour at most) for those deletions to replicate through before you then add them to the blackhole list.
-Steve

 

[dcrandell]

Austin you also may need to go into exchange system management and purge the mailboxes out of exchange.

Dan Crandell

 

[compgirlfhredi]

The best way to delete mailboxes in Microsoft Exchange Server is to avoid having to do brick-level backups or having to restore an entire private Information Store (IS) from backup just to restore one item. For this method to work, first you need to implement deleted item recovery for 30 days or more. Messaging API (MAPI) users can restore anything they delete by themselves; you won't need to do it for them. You will lose items that were deleted before the recovery threshold, so be sure to set the recovery period for as long as you can.
When you need to get rid of a mailbox, don't delete it right away. Instead, follow these steps:
Use the Hide from address list checkbox in the mailbox Properties dialog box to hide the mailbox from the Global Address List (GAL).
Remove the mailbox's SMTP addresses so that no one can send incoming Internet mail to the mailbox you are hiding.
In order for someone to still have access to the mailbox data, designate the departing user's supervisor to be the mailbox owner.Enter the termination date in the mailbox Notes field so that you can keep a record of this mailbox’s status.
After 30 days (or however long your retention period is,you can change this setting in the Registry), you can probably delete the mailbox without anyone's asking you to restore information that used to be in the mailbox

 

[compgirlfhredi]

If you go to the properties of the mailbox store and then go to the Limits Tab you can change the number of days before a mailbox is prged (the default is 30)
You could also right click the users with a red X and select purge.