Exchange 2013 Initial Configuration Settings: Setting email address policies (part 2)

Following on from the previous post Exchange 2013 Initial Configuration Settings: Setting SMTP accepted domains (Part 1) , in this second part of a series I’ll look at setting up an email address policy.

Until you create a new email address policy any recipients (users, resources, contacts, groups) you create will get their email address from the default email address policy. Therefore we’ll create a new email address policy with settings that we want before creating new recipients.

Another reason for having it in place before you create recipients is in large environments applying an email address policy can take a long time depending on the number of recipients it effects.

1. In the Exchange admin center (https://localhost/ecp) click mail flow from the left hand menu and then click on email address policies.

2. Click the + symbol to create a new email address policy.

3. Type in a Policy name, then click the + symbol to specify the Email address format.

4. Select an accepted domain name created from the previous post, in my case above I’m selecting oxfordsbsguy.com. Then choose the Email address format, the bit before the @ symbol and click save.

5. Confirm the settings are correct and click save again.

6. Click ok to the warning message.

7. With the new policy highlighted click Apply.

8. Read the warning and if safe to do so in your environment click yes, otherwise run the Exchange Management command specfied.

You should see the following message.

You’ll now see the email address policy has been applied.

If you check your recipients, you should see that their email addresses have changed (you may have to click the refresh icon).

Now you are in a position where any new user/mailbox you create will have the correct email address assigned to it.

Exchange Management Shell

As you look through other posts on the site you’ll see there is a lot of PowerShell and Exchange PowerShell, so to perform the same steps above in PowerShell we’ll need to use the Exchange Management Shell and the following cmdlets, Get-EmailAddressPolicy, New-EmailAddressPolicy and Update-EmailAddressPolicy.

Remember in PowerShell to search for a command you can use Get-Command *emailaddress* or GCM *emailaddress* to list all the cmdlets that contain the phrase emailaddress.

To view help you can use Get-Help before any command, and you can append -examples, -detailed, -full, -online for further information.

Note: To perform the tasks below I’ve removed the email address policy created in the Exchange admin center.

Get-EmailAddressPolicy
Lists and returns attributes of existing email address policies.

New-EmailAddressPolices
Creates a new email address policy.

To create the same policy in PowerShell we’ll use the following command.

New-EmailAddressPolicy -Name OxfordSBSGuy -EnabledPrimarySMTPAddressTemplate “SMTP:%g.%s@oxfordsbsguy.com” -IncludedRecipients AllRecipients -Priority 1

Now let’s use Get-EmailAddressPolicy to confirm the policy has been created and to find out whether it has been applied or not. You can use Get-EmailAddressPolicy | fl or format-list to list all the attributes to a policy.

Get-EmailAddressPolicy | ft Name, Priority, RecipientFilter, RecipientFilterApplied

So you can see the new policy exists but hasn’t been applied yet.