Monday, September 23, 2013

Exchange 2013 E-mail Traffic From inboundproxy@inboundproxy.com and HealthMailbox

In Exchange 2013, native, built-in monitoring and recovery actions are included in a feature called Managed Availability, which is made up of two processes: the Microsoft Exchange Health Manager Service (MSExchangeHMHost.exe) and the Microsoft Exchange Health Manager Worker process (MSExchangeHMWorker.exe), and the following components:
  • The Probe Engine takes measurements on the server;
  • The Monitoring Probe Engine stores the business logic about what constitutes a healthy state. It functions like a pattern recognition engine, looking for patterns and measurements that differ from a healthy state, and then evaluating whether a component or feature is unhealthy;
  • The Responder Engine, when alerted about an unhealthy component, first tries to recover that component. The first attempt may be to restart the application pool, the second attempt may be to restart the corresponding service and the third attempt may be to restart the server. The final attempt may be to put the server offline, so that it no longer accepts traffic.

Exchange 2013 automatically creates several HealthMailbox"guid" objects in Active Directory which are used by Managed Availability to send e-mails through Exchange to verify mail flow every few minutes. These e-mails are used to do health checks for resources from FrontEnd Transport service to Transport Service and health checks on mailbox database resources. The same Microsoft Exchange Health Manager Service is responsible for both these health checks.

Two health mailboxes are created for each mailbox database: one for mailboxes and one for Public Folders (if these are deployed). You can view these hidden mailboxes using Active Directory Users and Computers. You need to enable Advanced Features and then navigate to Microsoft Exchange System Objects and then Monitoring Mailboxes:


Or you can use the Exchange Management Shell and run the following cmdlet:
Get-Mailbox -Monitoring

 
 
This is why in an Exchange 2013 environment you will see lots of traffic from the e-mail addresses inboundproxy@inboundproxy.com, MailDeliveryProbe@MailDeliveryProbe.com and HealthMailbox(...)@domain.com with the subjects of “MBTSubmission/StoreDriverSubmission/(...)-MapiSubmitLAMProve”, “Inbound proxy probe” or “Client submission probe”.

This is by design!

Monday, September 9, 2013

Windows Azure Active Directory Synchronization Tool Version Release History

If you are finding it hard to keep up with all the improvements made to DirSync as well as all its versions, this Wiki keeps track of the versions that have been released and lists the main changes introduced.

Outlook Web App Views

As with previous versions of Exchange, Outlook Web App [OWA] in Exchange 2013 and the new Office 365 comes in two flavors:
  • OWA Premium: available in computers, tablets and phone optimized UI. Desktops must be using Internet Explorer 8+ and newer versions of Safari, Chrome and Firefox. As for tablets and phones, the supported versions are (for now) Windows 8 tablets, iOS6 on iPad2+ and iPhone 4+. Although not supported, the new OWA UI works just fine on recent Android mobile phones and tablets;
  • OWA Light: this is what users get on any browser not supported with OWA Premium. It uses a very simple HTML4 based UI which works in pretty much any browser in existence and remains the same as with the previous release of Exchange/OWA. A special note to say that IE7 now gets OWA Light as well...

OWA Premium has three different views:
  • The traditional Desktop view with a 3-columns mouse-based UI;
  • The Table view with a 2-columns touch UI also known as twide;
  • The Phone view with a 1-column touch UI also known as tnarrow.

Even if you do not have a tablet or a phone to test how these two different views look like, you can easily use your desktop browser to emulate them. To do so, use the following URLs:
  • https://<FQDN>/owa/?layout=twide
  • https://<FQDN>/owa/?layout=tnarrow

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Exchange Online Mailbox Size Now 50GB!

The size of user mailboxes in all Exchange Online and Office 365 service plans just doubled!
 
Since last week (end of August), the 25GB of mailbox storage increased to 50GB. There is no price increase associated with this change as the doubling of mailbox storage is simply part of Microsoft's promise to continuously deliver value to Office 365 customers. 
 
Customers don't need to do anything to take advantage of this new mailbox size as mailbox sizes will automatically be increased. This increase has already started and continues through November.
 
This increase to a 50GB mailbox per user benefits Exchange Online and Office 365 service plans, including: Exchange Online Plan 1, Office 365 Small Business, Midsize Business, Enterprise E1, Government G1, and Education A1.
Customers with a premium service plan (Exchange Online Plan 2, Office 365 Enterprise E3 and E4, Government G3 and G4, Education A3 and A4), already enjoy unlimited e-mail storage through personal archive, but now the default primary mailbox size is increasing to 50GB. Kiosk user mailboxes are doubling in size too, from 1 to 2GB.
 
In addition to doubling the storage of users' primary mailboxes, Microsoft has also increased the size of other mailboxes: shared mailboxes and resource mailboxes are both increasing to 10GB (more than double), but the size of Site mailboxes remains unchanged.
 
For complete details about mailbox types and sizes, read the Office 365 Service Descriptions.
 

Sunday, September 1, 2013

MS Exchange CON 2013 Virtual Conference

Get your top Microsoft Exchange questions answered!

- Hear from a top analyst from Osterman Research with the latest survey research on Exchange top trends and challenges;
- Watch how vendors are solving some of the biggest Exchange Management problems;
- Get answers to your top Exchange and Exchange 2013 questions with an Exchange MVP.

All from the convenience of your home/office, on September 12, 2013!

Discover answers to questions like:
- What are the key features of Exchange 2013?
- How can we secure and better control our Exchange environment?
- What are 5 strategies to better manage Exchange for 2013 and beyond?

This unique, online conference is limited to 1,000 participants, so register now if you have not already done so, register here.