“The attempt to connect to http://ExchangeServer.domain.com/PowerShell using “Kerberos” authentication failed: connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : The WinRM client cannot complete the operation within the time specified.  Check if the machine name is valid and is reachable over the network and firewall exception for Windows Remote Management service is enabled.  For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic.”

You might notice above error message after opening a Exchange Management Console. This error message indicates that connecting to given exchange server using WinRM has failed. Today I received the same error and verified that exchange is doing well on this box. I tried opening the console from different server and it worked file. So, it appeared some sort of profile problem to me.

I did the following to resolve the issue.

1. Close Exchange Management Console MMC
2. Go to %appdata%\Microsoft\MMC
3. Rename “Exchange Management Console” file to “Exchange Management Console.old”
4. Launch the console again.

Hope this helps…

Like Exchange 2003, there is no GUI available in Exchange 2007/2010 to make changes to Exchange Message tracking log settings. These settings involve, how many days of logs you want to store, what is the max size of each log, what is the total space you want to allocate to the tracking logs, and location of the logs on disk.

To query exchange tracking log settings, use the below command

[PS] C:Userslocaluser>Get-TransportServer -Identity HTSSERVER1 | fl *messagetracking*

MessageTrackingLogEnabled               : True
MessageTrackingLogMaxAge                : 15.00:00:00
MessageTrackingLogMaxDirectorySize      : 100MB
MessageTrackingLogMaxFileSize           : 10MB
MessageTrackingLogPath                  : C:Program FilesMicrosoftExchange ServerTransportRolesLogsMessageTracking
MessageTrackingLogSubjectLoggingEnabled : True

The above command returns total six parameters and each has its own significance. Their names are self explanatory as well.

If you want to turn off the messaging tracking, just use the below command.

Set-TransportServer HTSSERVER1 –MessageTrackingLogEnabled $false

Change the value to $true if you want to turn on the logging.

I am giving some more examples below to change other parameters.

To change the LogMaxage(no. of days logs you want to store) to 20 days,

Set-TransportServer -id HTSSERVER1 –MessageTrackingLogMaxAge 20.00:00:00

This parameter value is in DD.HH.MM.SS format.

To change the tracking logs location

Set-TransportServer -id HTSSERVER1 –MessageTrackingLogPath “E:MessageTrackingLogs”

To change total space allowcated for logs:

Set-TransportServer -id HTSSERVER1 –MessageTrackingLogMaxDirectorySize 1GB

To enable subject logging in message tracking:

Set-TransportServer -id HTSSERVER1 –MessageTrackingLogSubjectLoggingEnabled $true

Hope this information helps you.

If Exchange 2007 queue is growing fast and you want to find who is the top contributor, below code helps you. You need to run this code from a exchange management shell since the code involves Exchange cmdlets like get-message.

Find top 10 senders in Exchange Queue:

$senders = @{}
$queuemessages = Get-message -Resultsize unlimited
$queuemessages | % { $senders[$_.FromAddress] = $senders[$_.FromAddress] + 1 }
$senders.getenumerator() | sort value -last 10

Similarly you can filter the Get-Message output by recipients to get the top recipients.

For one of our client, we have received an alert stating that “The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service terminated with service-specific error 0 (0×0)”.

The error seems to simple and everyone would just suggest to start the service back. But the root cause was different.

One of our colleague started working on the alert and here is the chronology of steps followed in resolving the issue. found that the Information Store service was in stopped state and started the service.  Started verifying queues , encoutered error stating that “Default SMTP Virtual Server is unavailable”. Verified and found that SMTP Service was in started mode.

Escalated call to me and I’ve started working on the issue.

Upon further analysis, found that the SMTP Virtual Instance was stopped in ESM (Exchange System Manager). Tried to start the instance, encountered error stating that “Queue Directory is corrupted , hence the instance could not be started”.

Error logged in Eventlog & Error pop-up when accessed Queue Directory from explorer.

Executed following Steps to resolve issue:

1. Uninstalled existing Antivirus (AVG)

2. Executed chkdsk on volume in which the exchange database is stored. Found disk errors.

3. Executed chkdsk /f on the volume and restarted the server

4. Created new Queue Directory and pointed the path from ESM to the new folder.

5. Started SMTP Virtual Instance & Information Store Services.

Mails started flowing fine.

Outlook was unable to recover some or all of the items in this folder. Make sure you have the required permissions to recover items in this folder and try again. If the problem persists, contact your administrator

I came across this error while I(or my users) trying to restore bulk emails in outlook using “Recover Deleted Items” option. Single or little more emails restoration works fine but this issue is coming only when I attempt bulk restoration.

When this happened for the user, I am clue less what was happening. I went to event viewer on the server where user mailbox is hosted and observed below error when the user is attempting the restoration.

Event Type:     Error
Event Source:   MSExchangeIS
Event Category: General
Event ID:       9646
Date:           7/19/2010
Time:           3:45:47 PM
User:           N/A
Computer:       MYEXCHANGE
Description:
Mapi session “/o=ORG/ou=SITE/cn=Recipients/cn=myuser” exceeded the maximum of 500 objects of type “objtFolder”.

After a little bit of googling I found an article (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/830829/en-us) which is talking about similar issue and increasing the limits on Object types that you see in event viewer should fix the issue. I tried increasing the ObjFolder limit to 1000(note: 500 is the default; if you don’t find this key, it is safe to create one as per KB) on my exchange server but still it didn’t work and was saying exceeded the limit of 1000 this time. At this point I was not sure what was the optimum value to which I should increase this limit to make the restoration happen. As I didn’t find answer to this question in google, I polled one of friend who is with MS and knows more about exchange. He said there are no limits defined as such and it’s a trial and error method we should try. I bumped it to 10,000 this time and restoration worked. Along with this informaiton, my friend passed me a note as well. The more limit you put the more the load on your exchange server. So, be cautious while increasing the limits and I prefer to do it during off hours so that load will be less on the server and your users will be away anyways and that also gives you ample time to troubleshoot any unforeseen issues.

Additional note: While trying this you might see events about exceeding the limits of other object types described in aforementioned KB. You should create necessary registry keys for them as well to make your restoration suceessfull. Don’t forget to revert your settings once you are done with restoration; otherwise it will impact your server performance. Generally this will come into effect after store restart. Otherwise you can wait for 15-30 mins to make store pick these changes without restarting the IS.

Hope this information helps you.

With recent service pack(SP3), exchange started supporting installation on Windows 2008 R2. More details at http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/06/21/455145.aspx

Are you facing frequent time out issues with your exchange server? Your problem might be related to the components described in http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/05/14/454877.aspx.

If you are interested to know when your mailbox is created, try below PowerShell Oneliner…Basically what this does is, it uses Outlook application and fetches one of it’s schema property named PR_CREATION_TIME which contains the mailbox creation time.

(New-Object -ComObject Outlook.Application).Session.DefaultStore.GetRootFolder().PropertyAccessor.GetProperty(http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0x0E580102)

[Source:Shavy Blog]

While executing commands like Get-Mailbox, you often receive errors like identify is not found in default search scope. This you will see in a multi domain environment in general. In such cases, either you need to make the environment to look in whole forest for objects or ask powershell/cmdlet to ignore the scope. 

Here are the two ways I am talking about…

Set the search scope to forest level :- to do this, execute the below command

$AdminSessionADSettings.ViewEntireForest = $true

Make cmdlet to ignore the scope:- to do this, pass -ignoredefaultscope argument to cmdlet

Get-Mailbox -IgnoreDefaultScope -Identity “cn=username,ou=ouname,dc=domainname,dc=com”

Note that, incase of ignore default scope, you should parse only DN to -identity parameter.

Let me know if you figureout some other way.

When a Exchange 2007 user forwards a meeting request to someone, the meeting organizer will get a Notification with subject “Meeting Forward Notification: [actual meeting subject]” saying that meeting request is forwarded to people listed in notification email body. Though Microsoft says that it is a new feature, many of the users felt it annoying. In this article I am going to talk about how to disable this behavior.

To disable this functionality for a single mailbox, use the below cmdlet

Get-MailboxCalendarSettings -Identity user1 | Set-MailboxCalendarSettings -RemoveForwardedMeetingNotifications $true

Note: You can not really disable this behavior(or I haven’t come across any such procedure), but by applying above procedure, you are making meeting request forward notification messages to go directly into “Deleted Items”.  This way users won’t get annoyed with these notification messages. Alternately,  you can configure a HTS rule to identify and drop messages with subject containing the word, “Meeting Forward Notification”.

Happy Learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi.