Reinstalling IIS on an Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003 server

Chris Crowe — Wed, 31 May 2006 05:03:00 GMT

If you are running IIS on an Exchange Server 2000 or 2003 machine make sure you really think hard before you uninstall IIS - it is not a trivial process to get your exchange and IIS linked together again.

Microsoft has a KB article #320202 available here http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;320202 that describes the process in detail to get the system working again.

Apparently when you remove IIS you have also removed some additional configuration parameters that exchange has added to the IIS Metabase and you must follow the 6 steps below to relink the attributes when you install IIS again.

Back Up Data
Dismount the Mailbox and the Public Information Store
Stop Exchange Services and Remove IIS
Reinstall Internet Information Service and Reapply Service Packs
Reinstall Exchange Server
Restore the Original Exchange Information Store

So this is a non trivial action - just make sure you really know what you are doing prior to removing IIS and if you are going to remove IIS and follow the KB Article give yourself plenty of time...

Windows/Exchange - Email Forwarding System

Chris Crowe [IIS MVP] — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 00:50:00 GMT

EFS is "mail relay" software. It was specifically designed to give people with "part time" (dialup) connections to the Internet (or those with fulltime connections but their Internet Service Provider (ISP) does not support ETRN - which is not a protocol I recommend anyway) a way of retrieving mail from their ISP and delivering messages to an internal mail server, such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Lotus Notes 4 or 5, the freeware EMWAC IMS or in fact any RFC compliant SMTP server. You do not need a fulltime connection to the Internet to run EFS - it works with both static (full time) and dynamic (part time) IP addresses.

The best part about EFS is that once it's setup, it is basically maintenance free. Similar mail retrieval programs usually require you to add a separate mailbox for every user that mail will be distributed for - the simple downside of this, continuous maintainance and double data-entry. EFS does away with this by allowing you to specify the domain that you will be accepting mail for (just as you are required to do for your mail server). It is this "Internal routing" feature that makes EFS unique amongst most other POP3 retrievers, the ability to accept and deliver mail for your domain.

For more details see http://www.chimera.co.nz/

Exchange - Using WMI to list all mailboxes and their sizes from c#

Chris Crowe [IIS MVP] — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 23:42:00 GMT

First off this is my 100th post to my blog!

This is a sample of how to talk to MS Exchange to enumerate all of the mailboxes and display them with the total message count and total message size.

It also shows examples of:

Creating your own table
Using a DataView to sort the table
Writing to XML from a dataset
Padding Strings
Using the System.Management namespace

using System; 

namespace Sample1 
{ 
    ///  
    /// Summary description for Class1. 
    ///  
    class Class1 
    { 
        ///  
        /// The main entry point for the application. 
        ///  
        [STAThread] 
        static void Main(string[] args) 
        { 
            try 
            { 
                // http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/e2k3/e2k3/_wmiref_cl_exchange_mailbox.asp 

                System.Console.WriteLine("Enumerate mailbox sizes in MS Exchange Server - Chris Crowe"); 
                System.Console.WriteLine(); 

                // Create a DataSet (only needed if you want to save to XML ) 
                System.Data.DataSet ds = new System.Data.DataSet(); 
                // Create a DataTable to hold our results 
                System.Data.DataTable dt = new System.Data.DataTable("Mailboxes");             
                // Add the table to the dataset 
                ds.Tables.Add(dt); 

                // Create columns for our data 
                dt.Columns.Add(new System.Data.DataColumn("Mailbox", typeof(String))); 
                dt.Columns.Add(new System.Data.DataColumn("Messages", typeof(Int32)));             
                dt.Columns.Add(new System.Data.DataColumn("Size", typeof(Int32)));             

                //  
                System.Management.ConnectionOptions objconn = new System.Management.ConnectionOptions(); 
                objconn.Impersonation = System.Management.ImpersonationLevel.Impersonate; 
                // Gets or sets a value indicating whether user privileges need to be enabled for the  
                // connection operation. This property should only be used when the operation performed  
                // requires a certain user privilege to be enabled (for example, a machine reboot). 
                objconn.EnablePrivileges = true; 

                // Exchange Server Name 
                string cServername = "*"; // YOUR EXCHANGE SERVER NAME

                // Create a management scrope into the Exchange WMI namespace 
                System.Management.ManagementScope exmangescope =  
                    new System.Management.ManagementScope(@"\\" + cServername + @"\root\MicrosoftExchangeV2",objconn); 
             
                // Create a query to get the data from the Exchange WMI 
                System.Management.ObjectQuery objquery =  
                    new System.Management.ObjectQuery("SELECT * FROM Exchange_Mailbox"); 

                // Retrieves a collection of management objects based on the query. 
                System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher objsearch =  
                    new System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher(exmangescope,objquery); 

                // Invokes the WMI query and returns the resulting collection. 
                System.Management.ManagementObjectCollection queryCollection1 = objsearch.Get();  

                // Loop through each item in the collection 
                foreach( System.Management.ManagementObject instmailbox in queryCollection1 )  
                { 
                    // Add a row of data to our table 
                    dt.Rows.Add(new object[] {  
                                                 instmailbox["MailboxDisplayName"],     
                                                 instmailbox["TotalItems"],  
                                                 instmailbox["size"] } ); 
                }  

                // Used to calculate the size of all of the mailboxes and the message count 
                int TotalMessages=0; 
                Int64 TotalSize=0; 

                // Create a DataView to sort the data by Mailbox Size 
                System.Data.DataView dv = new System.Data.DataView(dt); 
                dv.Sort = "Size desc, Mailbox"; 

                // Write a heading 
                System.Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0} {1} {2} ",  
                    "Mailbox".PadRight(55),  
                    "Messages".PadLeft(8),  
                    "Size".PadLeft(13))); 
             
                // Write a line of dashes 
                System.Console.WriteLine("".PadRight(78, '-')); 

                // Get an enumerator to enumate the DataView to get the rows from the table (sorted) 
                System.Collections.IEnumerator enumerator = dv.GetEnumerator();             
             
                // Loop through each item in the table 
                while(enumerator.MoveNext()) 
                { 
                    // Get a row  
                    System.Data.DataRowView row = enumerator.Current as System.Data.DataRowView; 

                    // Display the row 
                    System.Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0} {1} {2} Kb",  
                        row["Mailbox"].ToString().PadRight(55),  
                        row["Messages"].ToString().PadLeft(8),  
                        row["Size"].ToString().PadLeft(10))); 

                    // Add the size and message count to our totals 
                    TotalMessages += Convert.ToInt32(row["Messages"]); 
                    TotalSize += Convert.ToInt64(row["Size"]); 
                } 

                // Write a row of dashes 
                System.Console.WriteLine("".PadRight(78, '-')); 

                // Write the totals 
                System.Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0} {1} {2} Kb",  
                    "Total".PadRight(55),  
                    TotalMessages.ToString().PadLeft(8),  
                    TotalSize.ToString().PadLeft(10))); 

                // Write the XML to a file if we want to 
                ds.WriteXml("Mailboxes.xml");         
            } 

            // Catch any problems and show a message! 
            catch(Exception e) 
            { 
                System.Console.WriteLine("Error : " + e.Message.ToString()); 
            } 
        } 
    } 
} 

This is how it displays its output to the console.

If you write the data to a XML file as the above example does this is how it may appear.

xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<NewDataSet>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>WeeThings</Mailbox>
    <Messages>742</Messages>
    <Size>41596</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>SMTP (SBS2003-{7390D6EA-A466-417D-A461-ADEA24553CB8})</Mailbox>
    <Messages>0</Messages>
    <Size>0</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>worldnet</Mailbox>
    <Messages>11</Messages>
    <Size>51</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>Paradise</Mailbox>
    <Messages>25</Messages>
    <Size>80</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>SystemMailbox{7390D6EA-A466-417D-A461-ADEA24553CB8}</Mailbox>
    <Messages>401</Messages>
    <Size>361</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>Art</Mailbox>
    <Messages>53</Messages>
    <Size>333</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>Chris Crowe [MVP]</Mailbox>
    <Messages>20</Messages>
    <Size>170</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>Pam Elston</Mailbox>
    <Messages>1052</Messages>
    <Size>20852</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>Stocks</Mailbox>
    <Messages>33</Messages>
    <Size>607</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>stuff</Mailbox>
    <Messages>106</Messages>
    <Size>1716</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>TradeMe</Mailbox>
    <Messages>287</Messages>
    <Size>1846</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>chris crowe</Mailbox>
    <Messages>4201</Messages>
    <Size>239183</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>IISFAQMailBoxes</Mailbox>
    <Messages>338</Messages>
    <Size>878</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>WeeThings_Trademe</Mailbox>
    <Messages>16</Messages>
    <Size>278</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>PamStocks</Mailbox>
    <Messages>94</Messages>
    <Size>160</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>Pets</Mailbox>
    <Messages>20</Messages>
    <Size>148</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>Chris Crowe</Mailbox>
    <Messages>14416</Messages>
    <Size>221939</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>IISMVP</Mailbox>
    <Messages>15</Messages>
    <Size>638</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>CarryingABitTooMuch</Mailbox>
    <Messages>19</Messages>
    <Size>1056</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>chris_iisfaq</Mailbox>
    <Messages>4944</Messages>
    <Size>48027</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>Forums</Mailbox>
    <Messages>2</Messages>
    <Size>4</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>Test</Mailbox>
    <Messages>4</Messages>
    <Size>5</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>System Attendant</Mailbox>
    <Messages>0</Messages>
    <Size>0</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>psoriasis</Mailbox>
    <Messages>3</Messages>
    <Size>5</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>Holiday</Mailbox>
    <Messages>959</Messages>
    <Size>24704</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
  <Mailboxes>
    <Mailbox>Braindump</Mailbox>
    <Messages>14</Messages>
    <Size>121</Size>
  </Mailboxes>
</NewDataSet>