Mimecast Blog - Latest Comments

Re: Get Full Control over your Exchange remote PowerShell session

Decato — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 02:34:25 -0000

Very nice but ...

PS > $identity = 'Mailbox Database 0311695863'
PS > $sb = {(Get-MailboxDatabase -Status –Identity $identity).DatabaseSize.ToBytes()}

This does not seem to work as $identity does not get properly parsed.
If I type the string in $sb directly it works, but using $Identity does not.

So how do I get a local variable to remote session?

Re: Vint Cerf is Too Modest; Internet Access is a Human Right

Oneill3 — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:53:35 -0000

Sorry Nathaniel, I think Vint is right on the money with this one.

Re: Vint Cerf is Too Modest; Internet Access is a Human Right

Vint — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 05:47:54 -0000

Nathaniel, I appreciate the intense response, but i still think there is an issue here that you may not have considered. I am not devaluing the Internet by any means. What I am saying however, is that we should not enshrine a particular technology as a human right. The right to communicate (speak, hear, write, read) is vital. Any particular way to do that is an enabler. You mention clothing. You would presumably agree that, for example, a formal black tie outfit is not, in itself, a human right. It IS an article of clothing, and clothing is, by your post, a human right. But what we care about is the clothing, not a particular garment, label, etc. The Internet is one of the most recent in a long skein of inventions that have enhanced our ability to share our thoughts and ideas. It is a remarkably malleable medium. But if, someday, something new comes along that is even better, will we cling to the Internet as a human right or turn to the new thing as a better enabler of the right to communicate?

By the way, the 32 bit address space was selected in 1973 when Bob Kahn and I wrote our first paper on the design of TCP. That allowed for 4.3 billion addresses. Computing was realized in the form of large scale time sharing systems, each one serving hundreds to thousands of users. At the time, it seemed like an amble address space FOR AN EXPERIMENT. By the early 1990s, it was well recognized that the space would ultimately be exhausted as the Internet became available to the public and effort to design its replacement began in the Internet Engineering Task Force. That resulted in a new standard format, IPv6 (version 6).

Re: Vint Cerf is Too Modest; Internet Access is a Human Right

Michael McClennen — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:55:38 -0000

Bravo, Nathaniel!

The only thing I'd add to this is to emphasize that as the technological level of our society changes over time, what constitutes a "human right" changes too.

You discussed this briefly in the case of clothing and shelter, but another example could be government regulation of printing presses. In 16th century England, for example, the government granted monopoly status to a small group of printing-press owners, effectively granting them the authority to decide what would and would not be printed. Although this action had many critics, at least it could be said that anyone who wanted to "get the word out" had many alternative channels to do so-- town criers, handwritten manuscripts, etc., all of which were at the time well-established as means of communication.

When the English government tried to impose much less stringent rules on the American colonies in the 18th century (the Stamp act, which was essentially a tax on printed material) this was decried as a violation of the fundamental human right of free speech. After 200 years of technological progress, the printing press had eclipsed all other means of mass dissemination of ideas and the others had faded into obscurity.

In a very similar way, nobody would have considered Internet access to be a fundamental right in 1995-- there were many other ways of getting one's message out. By now, other channels are slowly fading into obscurity and practical exercise of the right to freely communicate one's ideas to a mass audience requires uncensored access to the Internet.

Re: Exchange – Removing Illegal Alias Characters using PowerShell

Zolon — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 14:46:36 -0000

Will this work on DistributionGroups as well?

Re: Queue reporting in Exchange 2010 – Guest Post by Jaap Wesselius

Jaap Wesselius — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 05:19:36 -0000

Hi Ant,

I don't have such a script available, but it is an interesting idea. Can you elaborate a bit more on what you want to achieve and I'll see what I can do.

Thanks,
Jaap

Re: Queue reporting in Exchange 2010 – Guest Post by Jaap Wesselius

Ant Benedict — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 02:32:47 -0000

Hi Jaap,

Do you have any script similar to this but instead, it will look on the messages tab and send a notification if there is a message that is more than 10mb for example?

Re: Queue reporting in Exchange 2010 – Guest Post by Jaap Wesselius

Keith — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 12:42:23 -0000

Great Script - Love it

I did make the mod below to only report queues over a 0 and not the ShadowRedundancy.

$Queue = Get-ExchangeServer | where {$_.isHubTransportServer -eq $true} | Get-Queue | where {$_.Messagecount -gt 0 -and $_.DeliveryType -ne "ShadowRedundancy" } | Select Identity,DeliveryType,Status,MessageCount,NextHopDomain, LastRetryTime,NextRetryTime | ConvertTo-HTML -head $BodyStyle

Re: Open relay in Microsoft Exchange 2010 (and 2007)

Barry Gill — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 07:38:33 -0000

Hello Vman1 - yes, this has to be run per connector, though you could script that fairly simply to call the connector name...

Re: Open relay in Microsoft Exchange 2010 (and 2007)

Vman1 — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:11:06 -0000

What do you do if you have 4 or 5 connectors setup?
Do you have to run it on each one?

Re: Open relay in Microsoft Exchange 2010 (and 2007)

Nicolas Blank — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 01:59:23 -0000

Hi Andrew, understand your frustration.
No,
Receive Connectors by default do not allow anonymous submission, and
reciprocally, Send Connectors send anonymously by default, without requiring
authentication.

Re: Open relay in Microsoft Exchange 2010 (and 2007)

Nicolas Blank — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 01:58:50 -0000

No,
Receive Connectors by default do not allow anonymous submission, and
reciprocally, Send connectors send anonymously by default, without requiring
authentication.

Re: Open relay in Microsoft Exchange 2010 (and 2007)

aendrew — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 19:32:00 -0000

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't receive connectors inherently have to accept anonymous connections? And is it not the send connectors that have to have authentication? I'm just in the middle of trying to get Exchange 2010 to properly relay stuff; I swear I'll be bald from all the hair-pulling by the time I'm done...

Re: Migrating to Office 365 from BPOS without Mimecast

Andrew Kemp — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 10:10:43 -0000

The MigrationWiz tool looks like a good utility to use, and the price isn’t too bad. It could save a lot of hassle for a larger scale migrations for migrating the data from one service to the other. The other thing that was mentioned in the steps was about pointing your MX record to an IP with no SMTP listening to allow the emails to queue up? Would this actually happen? I’ll remember that one for future migrations and test it.

The biggest pain was the wait on the domains being removed from FOPE for BPOS so we could then Add it to Office 365, unfortunately I do not think there is any way around this whether your data is in Office 365 or BPOS you will still need to wait for the artefacts of the domains to be manually removed from FOPE for BPOS before you can verify your domain in Office 365. I now know that this can be done in a matter of hours since doing another BPOS to Office 365 migration, but still means down time on your email if you do not have anything else in place, such as mimecast

Re: Migrating to Office 365 from BPOS without Mimecast

Sammy — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 19:46:17 -0000

Here is a step by step guide to migrate from BPOS to Office 365:
http://migrationwiz.zendesk.co...

Re: It’s All About Me: Why Email Security Remains Elusive

Nathaniel Borenstein — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 18:44:54 -0000

You'll get no argument from me. Not only are user interfaces still poor, we've actually moved backwards regarding standards. I didn't mean to imply that it was actually possible, today, to do what I consider the only solution, encrypting to everyone.

Still, those issues could be solved with moderate effort. The real problem is that the institutions that would most need to make such an effort are quietly semi-hostile to the idea. They can't publicly say they're opposed to secure email, but commercial and government interests benefit from our vulnerability. In the end, the only ones who care about our email security are... us.

Re: It’s All About Me: Why Email Security Remains Elusive

Sam1421 — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 23:09:24 -0000

Your insights are good but I don't completely agree. For example, I would LOVE to use encrypted email with EVERYONE. However, I need counterparty-agreement on the tool. I tried setting up GPG but could not get others to go through the process of making it work. A while ago, I started using TrulyMail and love it. It's very easy to setup, even for the novice (click-a-button kind of easy). While I don't have every one of my contacts using it, I do have some (mostly family and very close friends). Those same people simply could not setup GPG. So, the issue is clearly *partly* related to ease-of-use.

As far as employers reading the emails of employees, there are legal issues there. That's why I don't send personal messages through company email systems (I use my own portable email client on a USB stick so I can use it at work and at home).

One day, I hope, we will all be on fully interactive encrypted systems. I hope that day will come while I am still alive.

Re: Microsoft Exchange 2010: Are you migration ready?

Shawn — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 14:17:12 -0000

A real-time block
list (RBL) is a method of stopping spammers from being able to send
out large quantities of distasteful spam. A real-time block list is
managed and maintained by an organization (company, non-profit, or
volunteers) who track spam activity and create a list of known
violators. Violations can include SMTP configurations to being
caught sending spam. Once you are on their list, you can typically
request removal. Some site will publish email addresses and all
messages received to that email address is spam.

When a computer connects to your
Exchange server, Exchange will query the specified real-time block
list. If the address is on that list, Exchange will generate an
error and refuse the message. The server that was trying to send the
spam is then responsible to generate a non-delivery report and send
it the sender. This will eventually lock up the sending server until
their open relay is detected and resolved.

For a list of real-time block lists,
please refer to the Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Setup

The process is the same for Exchange
2008 and Exchange 2010.

To setup a RBL, open Exchange
Management Console – the GUI, and under Organization Configuration
select Hub Transport. Select the Anti-Spam tab and right click IP
Block List Providers selecting Properties.

Shawn Z
http://www.internetworkconsult...

Re: Guest Post: Migrating between email servers- SMTP Namespace Sharing

Madushka — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 22:08:31 -0000

Good Work !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Re: Microsoft Office365 Migration doesn’t have to be scary

Justin Pirie — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 03:38:42 -0000

That's interesting. Can you describe the differences in the approaches?

Justin

Re: Microsoft Office365 Migration doesn’t have to be scary

sammy — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 02:11:37 -0000

It is still scary especially with DirSync. We use www.migrationwiz.com. No need to deploy the migration proxy, pruchase / add SSL certificates, etc.

Re: Guest Post: Migrating between email servers- SMTP Namespace Sharing

Gulab — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:54:07 -0000

Great stuff Clint. Keep up the good work!

Re: Scary but Safe: Being in the Cloud is like… Being in the Clouds

Steve Simmons — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 12:16:59 -0000

IMHO it's a control and responsibility issue. When you're driving (when the data's on your local hard disk), you feel in control and you feel responsible. You make your own decisions about safe and unsafe maneuvers (did I back up my disk recently? oh, I'm tired, I'll do it tomorrow). When something goes wrong and you bend a fender, it's your responsibility. You then make your own decisions about how much time and money to invest in the repair, or even just live with it (oh, I don't really need that picture anyway).

When it's external, you don't get to make any of those decisions. It becomes easy to direct blame at someone else, then get on your high horse and say they should have done it differently. The penalty you ask them to pay for their failure will also be much higher than one you'd be willing to pay for your own.

Control and responsibility. That's what it's all about.

Re: Scary but Safe: Being in the Cloud is like… Being in the Clouds

Miles Bader — Sun, 29 May 2011 04:45:28 -0000

Hmm, an excellent analogy...

Re: Information Overload: Coping Strategies for email

Justin Pirie — Thu, 26 May 2011 11:56:35 -0000

You're spot on- especially in a fast paced email culture- having to "remember" everything you need to do will soon kill you...