IISReset after importing new SSL certificates for Exchange 2010

  

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I ran into an interesting issue today with Exchange 2010.  I needed to add a few user mailboxes to an Exchange server, but when I tried to open the Exchange Management Console, I was greeted with a rather startling error:

"The WS-Management service cannot process the request. The user load quota of 1000 requests per 2 seconds has been exceeded. Send future requests at a slower rate or raise the quota for this user. The next request from this user will not be approved for at least <large number> milliseconds." 

I next tried to fire up the Exchange Management Shell and received the same error.  Worrisome, but I hadn't heard any reports from users about email issues, so I knew it couldn't be anything too severe.

My initial thought that somehow the server was under attack and being subjected to a large number of requests from a foreigh host proved to be untrue.  A bit of research turned up many different options for possible fixes, including registry modifications, IIS reconfigurations, and powershell commands to disable and remove SSL (see http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/exchange2010/thread/4d396628-3867-4c95-9541-e0eb021e0135).  One blog even hinted at ADSIEdits.  However, the SSL issue tipped me off, as I had just recently renewed the SSL certificate on this server.  This turned up a very helpful blog entry (http://jasonshave.blogspot.com/2011/01/resolved-ws-management-service-cannot.html) which suggested a simple IIS reset.

I opened a run prompt and ran 'iisreset /noforce', after which everything was back to normal.  Just goes to show that even though an error can seem dire, the solution is often quite simple.  It's always worth looking for the simple solution before getting too complicated and making a situation much worse than it already is.

Brian St. Marie - Sr. Systems Engineer

Give Us a Call 617-731-6319 and Ask a Professional IT Support Technician Any Questions You May Have!

Sending as an Email Alias in Outlook and Exchange

  

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Oftentimes, users want the ability to send email from a different address using Microsoft Outlook.  With a Microsoft Exchange server, it's very easy to add additional email addresses for users to receive mail, but not so easy to allow them to send from those addresses.

Each mailbox on an Exchange server has a primary address.  This is the address from which all mail is addressed when sending through this mailbox.  So even if you add aliases to this mailbox which allow it to receive mail on a different address, the user will not be able to send from that address.

Unfortunately, despite this being a highly requested feature by users for many years, Microsoft has yet to create any way to allow users to do this natively in Outlook and Exchange.

One workaround is to create a second "dummy" mailbox and assign the alias address to this mailbox instead.  Permissions can them be added to this dummy mailbox to allow the user to choose the dummy mailbox address as the "From" field on new emails.  The dummy mailbox can then be configured to forward any incoming email to the alias to the user's primary mailbox.  This will work, but it is a bit clunky, and requires the user to select the alias address out of the Global Address List each time they want to send an email with the alias address.

Likewise, a distribution list can be used to accomplish the same thing.  In addition, using a distribution list can allow more than one person to receive mail on the alias address, which can be useful for generic email aliases like support@ or sales@.  However, it still requires the users to select the alias address from the Global Address List each time they want to send from the alias.

The last option is to use a third party product to add functionality to Outlook which will allow the user to select a mailbox alias as their sending address as they compose a new email.  This setup is the most straightforward and intuitive for users, but it does require additional cost and software.

As multiple addresses per user becomes more and more common, hopefully Microsoft will add this functionality into future versions of Outlook and Exchange.  For now,  while there are no perfect solutions for this common problem, there are workarounds which can do the job.

Brian St. Marie - Sr. Systems Engineer

Give Us a Call 617-731-6319 and Ask a Professional IT Support Technician Any Questions You May Have!