Recipient Policies

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Recipient Policies

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Policies are a new feature of Microsoft® Exchange 2000 Server. A policy is a collection of settings that are applied to one or more Exchange configuration objects of the same class in Microsoft Active Directory®. There are two types of policies: system policies and recipient policies.

Recipient policies are used in Exchange 2000 Server to automatically control the generation of e-mail addresses for recipient objects. The following are recipient objects: mail-enabled users, contacts, groups, and public folders. Recipient policies are similar to the site addressing feature in Exchange Server 5.5, but are more flexible. For example, recipient policies allow you to create multiple addresses for a given address type. They also provide a set of LDAP-based filter rules. These rules allow you to select the set of recipients to which the recipient policy will apply.

With recipient policies, you can perform the following tasks:

  • Add a new address type to the default recipient policy. This results in the creation of additional e-mail addresses of the new address type for new and existing users. For an example of adding a new address type to a recipient policy, see Adding the Address Type to a Recipient Policy
  • Create a new recipient policy that can be applied selectively to a set of users. For example, you can create a specific LDAP address that will be created for all users in Marketing, or in Rome, or whose first names begin with the letter M.
  • Modify default e-mail addresses for existing recipients and designate new primary e-mail addresses.

Recipient policies are automatically applied to recipient objects by the Recipient Update Service (RUS), at intervals scheduled by an administrator. For more information about this service, see Recipient Update Service.

Default Recipient Policy

When you install Exchange 2000 Server, a default recipient policy is created that will generate the default e-mail addresses for all recipient objects in your Exchange organization.

In the Exchange System Manager, you can see the Default Policy by opening your Exchange Server/Recipients node and clicking Recipient Policies. Click the Default Policy to view its properties. You can modify the way e-mail addresses are generated throughout the organization by clicking a default e-mail address and modifying its properties.

The default recipient policy will always generate SMTP and X.400 addresses for recipient objects. It might also generate default addresses for address types served by gateways or connectors on the system.

New Recipient Policies

If you have created several recipient policies, each will be assigned a priority in the order in which they were created. You can modify these priorities to control how they will be applied. The highest number has the highest priority. Only one recipient policy will be applied to each user in the system. If more than one recipient policy is applicable to the user, the one with the highest priority will be applied. This is best illustrated with an example:

Jonathan Mollerup is a new user who works in the Public Relations department of Humongous Insurance in Chicago. His alias is jmoll.

Note  By default, every recipient policy creates a primary X.400 and SMTP address, along with the custom e-mail addresses that it creates, for each recipient to which it applies. These addresses are derived from the primary addresses specified in the default recipient policy. They cannot be deleted. You can designate a custom e-mail address to be the primary address for a user in the Active Directory Users and Computers utility.

  • The recipient policy named Chicago creates SMTP addresses of the form alias@chicago.HumongousInsurance.com for all recipients in the Chicago location. It has a priority of 2.
  • The recipient policy named PublicRelations creates SMTP addresses of the form alias@publicrelations.HumongousInsurance.com for all users in the Public Relations department. It has a priority of 1.
  • The default policy creates an SMTP address in the form alias@HumongousInsurance.com and an X.400 address for all users in the HumongousInsurance domain. It has a priority of Lowest.

Because the Chicago recipient policy has the highest priority, this is the policy that will be applied to e-mail address generation for Jonathan. He will receive messages addressed to the following addresses:

  • SMTP:jmoll@HumongousInsurance.com
  • SMTP:jmoll@chicago.HumongousInsurance.com
  • X.400:c=us;a=MCI;p=HumongousInsurance;o=northamerica;s=jmoll

For more information about recipient policies, see KB article Q249299, XADM:How to Configure Recipient Policies in Exchange 2000 Server.

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