Tasks that CANNOT be performed from the Exchange Management Console

 

I’ve been getting this question a lot! “What tasks CANNOT be performed from the Exchange Management Console?”

The following is the answer to this question. I’ve done a “best effort” to compile a complete list of these tasks. Feel free to comment here if you feel I should add information to this post or if there is incorrect information.

Tasks that MUST be performed from the Exchange Management Shell

Mailbox, Recipient and Public Folder Settings  

·         Get a list of all mailboxes, organized by size and number of items – Get-MailboxStatistics

·         Perform bulk management of multiple attributes for mailbox recipients – Get-mailbox | Set-Mailbox

·         Bypass antispam filtering for a specific recipient(s) Set-Mailbox -AntispamBypassEnabled $true

·         Get information about public folder sizes – Get-PublicFolderStatisics

·         Upgrade address lists and email address policies from LDAP syntax (after a migration from 2003) to OPATH syntax – Set-EmailAddressList

·         Give permission to a user’s mailbox (to another user) – Add-MailboxPermission

·         Give permission to an entire database, to a user – Add-ADPermission

·         All Public Folder management, for example:

o   Create Public Folders (Can be done from Outlook)

o   Mail Enable Public Folders

o   Enable Public Folder replication

o   Suspend/Resume Public Folder replication

o   Modify Public Folder Replication

o   Set/Modify Public Folder Quota

o   Modify Public Folder Referrals

·         Extract specific content from a mailbox and copy it to an alternate location – Export-Mailbox

·         Configure a resource mailbox to automatically accept all meeting requests – Set-MailboxCalendarSettings

·         Create (and modify) a new Global Address List – New-GlobalAddressList

Transport Settings

·         Set a maximum message size for incoming or outgoing messages (org) – Set-TransportConfig

·         Disable Xexch50 for outbound ESMTP connections – Set-TransportConfig

·         Set a maximum message size for incoming or outgoing messages (conn) – Set-ReceiveConnector

·         Add the Antispam tab to the Exchange Management Console – Set-TransportServer –AntispamAgentsEnabled $true

·         Set advanced SMTP connection settings such as Tarpit, connection timeouts, inactivity timeouts etc… – Set-ReceiveConnector

·         Install or uninstall antispam agents on a Hub Transport server – (un)install-AntispamAgents

·         Modify the properties of the Content Filtering agent to filter messages originating from authenticated servers INSIDE the organization – Set-ContentFilterConfig (useful if another server relays the message but does not perform filtering)

·         Add an exception to the Content Filtering agent to NOT perform any filtering for a specified SMTP Domain or Sender – Set-ContentFilterConfig –BypassSenderDomains / BypassSenders

·         Update the safe senders aggregation list -  Update-SafeList

·         Modify properties for the transport dumpster (Enable/disable – Max Size) – Set-TransportServer

·         Override AD Site link costs with Exchange Specific costs – Set-ADSiteLink

·         Design Exchange Hub Sites for message routing – Set-ADSite

·         Force a manual start to the Edge Synchronization between the HT and the ET servers – Start-EdgeSynchronization

Client Access Settings

·         Set connection time-outs for POP3/IMAP4 servers – Set-IMAPSettings / Set-POPSettings

  Following settings should be used with a Get-CASMailbox and piped to the Set-CASMailbox to be applied globally.

·         Prevent previous versions of Outlook from connecting to Exchange – Set-CASMailbox –MAPIBlockOutlookVersions

·         Enable/disable POP3 or IMAP4 for a user – Set-CASMailbox

·         Disable selected features of OWA (Calendaring, Change Password button etc…) – Set-CASMailbox

Other

·         Reseed a LCR or CCR (Maybe SCR ?) database copy – Update-StorageGroupCopy

·         Specify a message class for Managed Content Settings (For message classes NOT available in the EMC, such as IPM.XYZ) –  New-ManagedContentSettings

·         Create a customized quota message to mailbox recipients – New-SystemMessage

·         Create a customized Delivery Status Notification message – New-SystemMessage

·         Enable/disable, modify the properties of Message Tracking – Set-MailboxServer

·         Specify the number of ‘unreplicated logs’ that a CCR node will allow, and still mount a database a failover – Set-MailboxServer –AutoDatabaseMountDial

·         Allow a database to be overwritten by a restore operation – Set-MailboxDatabase –AllowFileRestore

·         Configure domain controllers that should NOT be used by your Exchange server – Set-ExchangeServer –StaticExcludedDomainControllers

       Modify the email address visible by external recipients, for internal users – New-AddressRewriteEntry