Configuring Exchange Server 2016

Creating a Mailbox

In previous versions of Exchange, you managed mailboxes using the Exchange Management Console. In the 2013 and 2016 versions of Exchange, you use the web-based Exchange Administrative Center (EAC) instead. To start EAC, choose Start ⇒ All Apps ⇒ Microsoft Exchange 2016 ⇒ Exchange Administrative Center.

When you create a new mailbox, you can either specify either an existing Active Directory user or use EAC to create a new Active Directory user and mailbox at the same time. The following procedure describes the steps you should follow to create a new Active Directory user with a mailbox:

Open the Exchange Administrative Center by choosing Start ⇒ All Apps ⇒ Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 ⇒ Exchange Administrative Center.
When prompted, enter your username and password.

The EAC comes to life, as shown in Figure 8-1.
Click the plus sign (+) icon above the list of mailboxes, and then choose User Mailbox.

The User Mailbox page appears, as shown in Figure 8-2.
Enter the alias for the new mailbox.

The alias is the portion of the email address that appears before the at (@) sign. For example, in the email address mitchell@lowewriter.com, the alias is mitchell.
Choose New User.
Type the user's first name, middle initial, and last name.

As you type the name, the Display Name field is automatically filled in.
Change the Display Name field if you want it to appear different from what was proposed.

You may want to reverse the first and last names so the last name appears first, for example.
Enter the user logon name.

This name must be unique within the domain and will be used to form the user’s email address.
Enter the password twice.

You’re asked to type the password twice, so type it correctly. If you don’t type it identically in both boxes, you’re asked to correct your mistake.
If the password is temporary, select the User Must Change Password at Next Logon check box.

This setting requires the user to change the temporary password the first time he or she logs on.
Click Save.

The user’s mailbox is created and appears in the EAC Recipients page, as shown in Figure 8-3.
Pat yourself on the back; then click Finish.

You’re done!

FIGURE 8-1: The Exchange Administrative Center.

FIGURE 8-3: The new user’s mailbox appears in the Recipients page.

Managing Mailboxes

After you’ve set up a mailbox, you can use the Exchange Administrative Center to manage the settings of the mailbox. To do that, just select the mailbox you want to manage, and click the Edit icon. This action brings up the User Mailbox page, which is the portal to many of the most frequently used features of Exchange.

The following sections describe several commonly used features you can enable when you edit a mailbox.

Enabling mailbox features

Exchange Mailbox Features refers to several features of Exchange mailboxes that are controlled via the Mailbox Features tab of the User Mailbox page. This tab is shown in Figure 8-4.

The following paragraphs describe some of the features that are controlled from this tab:

Outlook on the Web: Lets the user access his or her Exchange mailbox from a web browser rather than from an Outlook client. With this feature enabled, the user can read email from any computer that has an Internet connection.
Exchange ActiveSync: Activates the ActiveSync feature, which allows Exchange data to synchronize with mobile devices such as iPhones or Windows Mobile phones.
MAPI: Enables email using the MAPI protocol.
POP3: Enables email using the POP3 protocol.
IMAP4: Enables email using the IMAP4 protocol.
Archiving: Enables the Exchange Archive feature, which is available only with the Enterprise edition of Exchange.
Mail Flow: Lets you set delivery options such as creating an automatic forwarder, as described in the next section.
Message Size Restrictions: Lets you set the maximum size of incoming or outgoing messages.

Creating a forwarder

A forwarder is a feature that automatically forwards any incoming email to another email address. This feature is most often used when an employee is on vacation or leave and the employee’s manager has requested that someone else temporarily handle the absent employee’s email.

To configure a forwarder, follow these steps:

In Exchange Administrative Center, open the User Mailbox page for the user.
Select the Mailbox Features tab, and then click View Details in the Mail Flow section.

The delivery options are displayed, as shown in Figure 8-5.
Select the Enable Forwarding check box.
Click the Browse button.

The Select Recipient window appears, as shown in Figure 8-6.
Select the recipient you want to forward the email to and then click OK.

The name you selected is displayed in the text box next to the Browse button in the Delivery Options page (refer to Figure 8-5).
If you want the email to be delivered to this user’s mailbox in addition to the forwarding address, select the Deliver Message to Both Forwarding Address and Mailbox check box.

If you leave this option deselected, only the forwarding address will receive the email; the mail won’t be delivered to this user’s mailbox.
Click OK to close the Delivery Options page.

You return to the User Mailbox page.
Click Save to save your changes.

FIGURE 8-5: Setting the delivery options.

FIGURE 8-6: Select the recipient for the forwarder.

Setting mailbox storage limits

Exchange lets you set a limit on the size of each user’s mailbox. In a very small organization, you can probably get away without imposing strict mailbox size limits. But if your organization has 20 or more users, you need to limit the size of each user’s mailbox to prevent the Exchange private mail store from getting out of hand.

Exchange provides five kinds of storage limits for user mailboxes:

Issue Warning At: When this limit is exceeded, an email warning is sent to the user to let him know that his mailbox is getting large.
Prohibit Send At: When this limit is reached, the user can’t send email, but the mailbox continues to receive email. The user won’t be able to send emails again until she deletes enough emails to reduce the mailbox size below the limit.
Prohibit Send and Receive At: When this limit is reached, the mailbox shuts down and can neither send nor receive emails.
Keep Deleted Items for (Days): Most users don’t realize it, but when they permanently delete an item from their mailbox, the item isn’t really permanently deleted. Instead, Exchange retains the item for the period specified by this limit. The default is 14 days.
Keep Deleted Mailboxes for (Days): This limit specifies how long Exchange should retain mailboxes that you delete.

You can (and should) set a default storage limit that applies to all mailboxes in your organization. You can also override these limits for specific users.

To configure the default storage limits for all mailboxes, follow these steps:

In Exchange Administrative Center, select Databases.

A list of databases for your Exchange environment appears, as shown in Figure 8-7. In this example, there is just one database. For larger Exchange environments, you may see several databases.
Double-click the database whose limits you want to change.

The Mailbox Database page appears, as shown in Figure 8-8.
Select Limits.

The Mailbox Database Limits page is displayed, as shown in Figure 8-9.
Change the Storage Limits settings to meet your needs.

By default, the storage limits are set quite high: Warnings are issued at about 1.9GB, send permission is revoked at 2GB, and both send and receive permissions are revoked at 2.3GB. These limits are generous, but bear in mind that if you have 100 users, your mailbox database may grow to 200GB. You may want to set lower limits.
Click Save.

The limits you set take effect immediately.

FIGURE 8-7: The Exchange Admin Center Databases page.

FIGURE 8-9: The Mailbox Database Limits page.

If you impose restrictive default storage limits for your users, you may want to relax the limits on a case-by-case basis. Some users may require a larger mailbox because of the type of work they do, and you probably don’t want to impose a tight limit on your boss.

Fortunately, it’s easy to override the default limits for a specific user. Here are the steps:

In Exchange Administrative Center, choose Recipients, then double-click the mailbox you want to edit.

The user’s mailbox page appears.
Select Mailbox Usage.

The Mailbox Usage page is displayed, as shown in Figure 8-10.
Click More Options.

The mailbox limits options are displayed, as shown in Figure 8-11.
Change the Storage Limits settings to meet your needs.

You can adjust any of the mailbox limits up or down to create limits for the user that are either more or less restrictive than the defaults for the database.
Click Save.

The limits you set take effect immediately.

FIGURE 8-11: Setting the default storage limits.

You can configure many other features of Exchange via the Exchange Management Console. You should take some time to explore all the nodes in the navigation pane and to examine the Properties dialog boxes for the various types of Exchange objects that appear when you select each node.

Configuring Outlook for Exchange

After you’ve created an Exchange mailbox for a user, you can configure that user’s Outlook client software to connect to the user’s account. Although you can do this configuration directly within Outlook, it’s better to do it outside Outlook, using the Control Main Mail applet. Here are the steps:

Open Control Panel, and open the Mail applet.

The dialog box shown in Figure 8-12 appears.
Click the Show Profiles button.

The dialog box shown in Figure 8-13 appears, listing the mail profiles that already exist on the computer.
Double-click the user’s profile.

The Mail Setup dialog box shown in Figure 8-14 appears.
Click the E-mail Accounts button.

The Account Settings dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 8-15.
Click the New icon.

An Add E-mail Account dialog box appears. Don’t enter your email address as prompted in this dialog box; instead, proceed to Step 6.
Click the Manually Configure Server Settings or Additional Server Types option and then click Next.

A dialog box asks you what type of email account you want to create. The choices are (a) Outlook.com or Exchange ActiveSync Compatible Service or (b) POP 3 or IMAP.
Select the Outlook.com or Exchange ActiveSync Compatible Service option and then click Next.

The Server Settings dialog box shown in Figure 8-16 appears.
Enter the name of the Exchange server and the username in the appropriate text boxes; then click Next.

After your account information is verified, a confirmation message is displayed.
Click OK.

The confirmation message disappears, and the last page of the E-Mail Accounts Wizard appears.
Click the Finish button.

The wizard is dismissed.
Choose File ⇒ Exit.
Restart Outlook.

The mailbox should be configured.

FIGURE 8-15: The Account Settings dialog box.

FIGURE 8-16: You must identify the Exchange server and provide a username.

Viewing Another Mailbox

Sometimes, you want to set up Outlook so that in addition to the user’s main mailbox, he or she has access to another user’s mailbox. Suppose that you create a user named Support so that your customers can send email to Support@YourCompany.com to ask technical support questions. If you don’t set up at least one of your users so that he or she can read the Support mailbox, any mail sent to Support@YourCompany.com will languish unanswered. Assuming that this situation isn’t what you want, you can set up one or more of your users to access the Support mailbox so that those users can read and respond to the mail.

First, you must configure the Support user account’s mailbox so that it grants access rights to each user whom you want to access the account. To do that, follow these steps:

In Exchange Administrative Center, open the User Mailbox page for the user.
Select Mailbox Delegation.

The Mailbox Usage page is displayed, as shown in Figure 8-17. (For this figure, I scrolled to the bottom of the page to show the Full Access settings.)
Click the Add icon.

The Select Full Access page opens, as shown in Figure 8-18.
Select the user you want to grant access to; then click OK.

You’re returned to the wizard. The user you added is selected in the list of users who have access to the mailbox.
Click the Save button.

The mailbox rights are updated.

FIGURE 8-17: The Mailbox Delegation page.

FIGURE 8-18: The Select Full Access page.

After you’ve granted access to the account, you can configure the user’s Outlook to read the Support account. Follow these steps:

On the user’s computer, start Outlook, and choose Tools ⇒ Account.

The Account Settings dialog box is displayed.
Select your main email account and then click Change.

The Server Settings dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 8-19.
Click the More Settings button to open the Microsoft Exchange dialog box and then click the Advanced tab.

The Advanced tab is shown in Figure 8-20.
Click the Add button.

A dialog box appears, prompting you for the name of the mailbox you want to add.
Type the name of the mailbox you want to add and then click OK.

The mailbox is added to the list box in the Microsoft Exchange dialog box (refer to Figure 8-20).
Click OK.

You’re returned to the Server Settings dialog box.
Click Next and then click Finish.

You’re done! Now you can view the Support mailbox.

FIGURE 8-19: The Server Settings dialog box.

To view the mailbox, you need to open the Folder List window in Outlook (by choosing View ⇒ Folder List). Then you can double-click the Support mailbox in the list to open it.