Tag Archives: exchange

Review: Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Recovery

Recovering data and mailboxes from Microsoft Exchange EDB databases can sometime be a nightmare. I came across the software from Stellar Phoenix called Mailbox Exchange Recovery and for a small software, I managed to solve huge problems while minimising the time of recovery and the time effort to recover the mailboxes/items or EDB databases versus the conventional tools available.

Apart from solving the problems I had, Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Recovery is a simple to use software. When you open it, you just point the software to the EDB file and it will automatically scan the EDB file to list the mailboxes. Depending on the corruption of the EDB database you can choose between Quick Scan or Extensive Scan. Once the scan is complete, you will get a full preview of all mailboxes in the database with the facility to browse in the actual folders. Apart from that you can also have a preview of the email you are looking at in the right pane. With this software you can also scan and export from multiple EDB files if you have multiple departments and create an EDB for each one.

If you have a specific recovery criteria from the user, you can easily filter by To, From, CC, Subject, Body, Attachment, Importance and Item Type; apart from the date range. There are various export options you ca use which some are PST, MSG, EMAIL. It came very useful when I had to recovery mails or mailboxes from a decommissioned Exchange Server, where I just restored the EDB file and exported all the mailboxes to PST in one go. This version of Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Recovery can server also in migration projects to Office 365, where for example I found it very useful with Exchange 2007 clients migration to Office 365 and apart from exporting all mailboxes to PST was very easy and fast. On the other hand, you can easily restore the mailboxes to a live EDB file or directly to an Office 365 tenant. Really came in handy for a client who was migrating to Office 365 from a Exchange 2007. The solution was to export all mailboxes to PST, upload them and importing them through Office 365 portal but then this software allowed me to open the EDB file and export/import the mailbox directly to Office 365 without any hassle with all the calendar, tasks ad folder structure the user had in his on-premise solution. So apart from a recovery tool, I found it an excellent tool for migration tasks.

To cut story short, you can go with the repair, scan and use other applications to recover a corrupted EDB, but to be honest why would you end up with a huge amount of time scanning and repairing where you can easily use this software to recover you data and not having raging users waiting to access their precious emails? With Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Recovery, one can easily create a new EDB file containing new mailboxes, export all mailboxes to PST using the application and restore business in no time.

In conclusion this is a great tool to have if you have Microsoft Exchange servers or if you are in a position to migrate to Office 365. The software is so easy to use and for the price, it’s really worth the money starting from $399 to $999 depending on the license needs. If you are still indecisive, you can always download the trial to check if your EDB file is recoverable. The software supports Exchange 2016 downwards to Exchange 5.5.

Check the software on the link below and get your trial now

https://www.stellarinfo.com/edb-exchange-server-recovery.htm

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Fix: No Suitable Directory Servers Found when accessing OWA and ECP

When accessing ECP or OWA on your Exchange server you will be the below Server Error saying that No Suitable Directory Servers Found in Site and connected Sites. On the Event Viewer you will get the error 0x80040a02 (DSC_E_NO_SUITABLE_CDC).

The below solution if for Exchange 2003, 2007, 2010 and 2013. Open the Domain’s Group Policy Management and edit the Default Domain Controllers Policy or your server policy as below.

Computer Configuration
Policies
Windows Settings
Security Settings
Local Policies
User Rights Assignment
Mange auditing and security log
Add ‘Exchange Servers‘ or ‘Exchange Enterprise Servers‘ to that policy.

Restart the Exchange server to apply the computer configuration.

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How to: Remove Exchange mailbox export requests

After a number of exports or imports, you might need to clean up the failed, completed or other status when running the get-mailboxexportrequest report in PowerShell. To clean these open the Exchange PowerShell and run the below.

Clean Export requests
Get-MailboxExportRequest -Status Completed | Remove-MailboxExportRequest
Get-MailboxExportRequest -Status Failed | Remove-MailboxExportRequest

Clean Import requests
Get-MailboxImportRequest -Status Completed | Remove-MailboxExportRequest
Get-MailboxImportRequest -Status Failed | Remove-MailboxExportRequest

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Fix: Exchange error 0x800ccc6c – Verify that the mailbox exists and that the Exchange receive connectors are configured properly

When having especially SBS 2008 with the POP3 Connector to retrieve mail from an outside mailbox to your internal Exchange server, you may encounter the below error in the Event Viewer.

An error occurred while delivering mail to ‘mailbox@mydomain.com’ on the SMTP server ‘localhost’. The error code was 0x800ccc6c. Verify that the mailbox exists and that the Exchange receive connectors are configured properly.

Thou the error message is misleading, this problem can happen if the POP3 Protocol Errors meet the tolerance of the Exchange SMTP Receive connectors. Exchange will close an SMTP connection after a certain number of protocol errors. The default is 5.

To solve the issue, in my case I had to in increase the value of “MaxProtocolErrors” for the Exchange SMTP Receive connectors from Exchange Management Shell by using the below command.

Set-ReceiveConnector -identify “Name of Connector” -MaxProtocolErrors 999

After this, I have restarted the POP3 Connector retrieval of messages and it worked.

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Fix: Your automatic reply settings cannot be displayed because the server is unavailable

When setting up the automatic reply and out of office from your Outlook 2010 having Exchange 2010 you might have the problem with a pop-up saying “Your automatic reply settings cannot be displayed because the server is unavailable”.

I have managed to solve this with a DNS record in your infrastructure. Create the following SRV record to fix the issue.

Service: _autodiscover
Protocol: _tcp
Port Number: 443
Host: myexchangeserver.mydomain.local

On the client PC run the following to refresh the DNS. Make sure you run the CMD as Administrator

ipconfig /flushdns
ipconfig /registerdns

This should fix the problem and the user will be prompted to enter his Out of office settings.

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How to: Remove Arbitration mailboxes from Exchange Mailbox servers

Sometimes you would like to uninstall a mailbox server or un-install a mailbox server but when you make the Get-Mailbox -Arbitration -Database DataBase1 you see some mailboxes there. These are there to prevent you from deleting the mailbox database or server. These are used by the Exchange server. You can either move or delete these mailboxes. If this is not the last mailbox server in your setup I would suggest you move them, otherwise delete them or you will not be able to uninstall the server.

Moving the mailboxes
Get-Mailbox -Arbitration -Database EXCHDB1| New-MoveRequest -TargetDatabase EXCHDB2

Disabling the mailboxes
Get-Mailbox -Arbitration -Database EXCHDB1| Disable-Mailbox -Arbitration

Deleting the mailboxes
Get-Mailbox -Arbitration -Database EXCHDB1| Remove-Mailbox -Arbitration -RemoveLastArbitrationMailboxAllowed

If you would like to re-create them, I would suggest the below

Setup.com /PrepareAD /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms
or
.\Setup /PrepareAD /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms

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Fix: Emails not showing in Exchange after IMAP import

When importing from PST files exported from an IMAP Server, the messages might not be showing when viewing them in Outlook although they are there. The messages are visible in OWA (Outlook Web Access) and you cannot move emails into the folders when this is done from OWA.

This is because when you import the PST, the messages are imported with the IMAP message format and need to be changed to IPF.NOTE format.

Download the ExFolders from the Microsoft website or from the tools page here.
Extract Exfolders.exe into C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\Bin
Run the Registry file and import it

Make sure you have ‘Manage As’ permissions on the mailboxes you need with the logged in user.

Open ExFolders from the bin folder

Goto Tools and Options
Enable Logging to File

Goto File and select Connect with
Type: Mailboxes
Connect by: Database
Select the GC server
Select the Mailbox Database
You should see all the mailboxes listed

Goto Tools and open Custom Bulk Operation
Select Mailboxes as your Base Folder
Enter (&(0x3613001E=IPF.Imap)) in the Overall Filter
Click on the Add button and select Other Folder Properties and click OK
Select Action as Modify
Select PR_CONTAINER_CLASS : 0x3613001E as Property
Enter IPF.Note as Value
Click OK and OK

This should process the folders and emails. From here Exfolders will walk through the mailbox container(s) and change each instance of the PR_CONTAINER_CLASS from IPF.Imap to IPF.note

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How to: Increase OWA timeout for Exchange 2010 and 2007

Though it’s a good security feature to timeout users by default, one can have some issues with people using just OWA to read their mail having to enter the password every 5 minutes. So here’s how to increase the timeout.

By default the Public timeout is 15 minutes where as the Private timeout is of 8 hours.

If you would like to change these simply do the following.

Open registry editor
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesMSExchange OWA
Create new DWORD named PrivateTimeout
Create new DWORD named PublicTimeout
Now, enter the decimal value in the DWORDs created as required.

Note: The DWORDs entries are in minutes

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