This will probably never come up in my ventures as the Administrator here at my job, but it has come up with one of our customers. They do not have a Certificate Authority (CA) and do not pay for an outside certificate. They also use Exchange 2007. I’m not privy to all the ins and outs of their network, but they’re a standard small business with 4 or 5 servers. And it’s been 53 weeks since they installed Exchange 2007.

Why is 53 a number you should scoff at? Every 52 weeks (365 days, 12 months, 1 year, 1/10th of a decade…) you have to resign the self-signed certificate that Exchange gives itself. Why do I even need a certificate, you ask. The certificate is required for all TLS communication. Anything that’s even remotely secured uses TLS. Outlook uses TLS. If the certificate is invalid or non-existent, Outlook will refuse to send and receive emails from your Exchange server. Not good. I’m not sure why their server lasted 53 weeks and not 52, but maybe the guy got it wrong (he’s fairly technical though).

Here’s a quick and easy way of renewing your certificate:
1.) On your Exchange 2007 server, open up the Exchange Management Shell
2.) Type “get-exchangecertificate” and hit enter. This will show all installed certificates.
Type “get-exchangecertificate | fl *” to show everything about the installed certificates.
Type “get-exchangecertificate | fl services, thumbprint” to show only the services with the thumbprint for each certificate.
3.) Type “get-exchangecertificate -thumbprint thumbprint_of_cert | new-exchangecertificate
4.) Type “enable-exchangecertificate -thumbprint thumbprint_of_new_cert -services “IMAP,POP,SMTP,IIS”
5.) Test the services
6.) Remove the old certificate. Type “remove-exchangecertificate – thumbprint thumbprint_of_old_cert

You’ll have to do this every year if you use the self-signed certs. If you use a CA, the issued certificate will last anywhere from 1 to 5 years. You can also use your internal CA to issue new signed-certificates. You can use the standard website template, and then use the Exchange Management Shell to add the services to the new certificate (enable-exchangecertificate -thumbprint thumbprint -services “imap,pop,smtp”. You can leave out IIS since it *should* already be there.

**** EDIT ****

New-ExchangeCertificate -SubjectName "DC=domain, DC=com, CN=server.domain.com" -DomainName server.domain.com,mail.domain.com -IncludeAcceptedDomains -IncludeAutoDiscover -Services "SMTP" -PrivateKeyExportable $true
This updates the certificate to cover all domains used by Exchange. You can also specify other domains like mail.domain, webmail.domain etc.

Get-ExchangeCertificate
Get-ExchangeCertificate | FL
These allow you to find the thumbprint of the certificate you created.

Enable-ExchangeCertificate -Thumbprint THUMBPRINT -Services SMTP,IMAP,POP,IIS
This will turn on the services for your thumbprinted certificate. Obviously you can choose which services to allow.

Export-ExchangeCertificate -Thumbprint THUMBPRINT -BinaryEncoded:$true -Path C:\SSCert.pfx -Password:(Get-Credential).password
This exports your personal certificate PFX file with the password you choose at the prompt. This can then be pushed out to users to trust this file. Check for root certificate installations for other details.

OR, if you have your own Certificate Authority:

New-ExchangeCertificate -GenerateRequest -SubjectName "o=My, o=Site, cn=MyServer.MyDomain.com" -IncludeAcceptedDomains
-Path c:\MyServer.MyDomain.com.req
Open this file using notepad or the like, and copy the information between the start and end of the certificate.
Now log into your Certificate Authority
http://CAServer/certsrv
Click Request a certificate
Submit an advanced certificate request
Submit a certifcate request by using a base-64-encoded CMC or PKCS #10 file, or submit a renewal request by using a base-64-encoded PKCS #7 file
Paste the certificate information from earlier
Change the Certificate Template to Web Server
Click submit

You should now have a certificate issued. You’ll probably want to download it – so select Base64 encoded and download the certificate. I always choose to download the full path AND the general cert.

Copy your newly issued/downloaded certificate to your Exchange server.
Import-ExchangeCertificate -Path c:\2009mycert.cer | Enable-ExchangeCertificate -Services SMTP,POP,IMAP,IIS

If you already have a certificate that’s the default one on Exchange, you’ll notice that the SMTP and IIS settings DO NOT STAY.
You’ll have to:
Enable-ExchangeCertificate -Thumbprint MYTHUMBPRINT -Services SMTP,IIS
Exchange will ask if you want to overwrite the current certificate with Y for yes.
You’re done!

If only Microsoft would realize that it’s pretty easy to add a single column known as “size of mailbox” when searching through the GUI exchange management tool. Instead, we have to open up the Command prompt tool. Big deal.

Here’s the quick and easy way to list the name of the mailbox, size of said mailbox, and number of emails:
Get-MailboxStatistics | Sort-Object TotalItemSize -Descending | ft DisplayName,@{label="TotalItemSize(KB)";expression={$_.TotalItemSize.Value.ToKB()}},ItemCount

And apparently you can get it to email you if you write a script as follows:
###Send mailbox statistics script
###First, the administrator must change the mail message values in this section
$FromAddress = "MailboxReport@ngh.net"
$ToAddress = "administrator@ngh.net"
$MessageSubject = "Mailbox Size Report"
$MessageBody = "Attached is the current list of mailbox sizes."
$SendingServer = "e2k7.ngh.net"
###Now get the stats and store in a text file
Get-MailboxStatistics | Sort-Object TotalItemSize -Descending | ft DisplayName,@{label="TotalItemSize(KB)";expression={$_.TotalItemSize.Value.ToKB()}}, ItemCount > mailboxes.txt
###Create the mail message and add the statistics text file as an attachment
$SMTPMessage = New-Object System.Net.Mail.MailMessage $FromAddress, $ToAddress,
$MessageSubject, $MessageBody
$Attachment = New-Object Net.Mail.Attachment("./mailboxes.txt")
$SMTPMessage.Attachments.Add($Attachment)
###Send the message
$SMTPClient = New-Object System.Net.Mail.SMTPClient $SendingServer
$SMTPClient.Send($SMTPMessage)


But I couldn’t get it to actually attach the txt document.

EDIT!!!

11.11.2008

I got it to work – the problem was with a couple issues we had.

1.) In the Windows PowerShell, you must Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted
2.) I wrote a bat file to open this once a week:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\PowerShell.exe -PSConsoleFile "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\bin\exshell.psc1" -command ". 'C:\sendstats.ps1'"
3.) I wrote a ps1 file to run the actual commands (see above for the code)
4.) If you get an error, see if the following command helps:
Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Admin
5.) MAKE SURE the get-mailboxstatistics is all on one single line – I can’t tell you how much word-wrap in notepad screwed me out of 20 minutes of time.

***EDIT 05.23.2011***
So Exchange 2010 screwed me a little bit on this – it requires another flag:
Get-MailboxStatistics -server SERVERNAME | Sort-Object TotalItemSize -Descending | ft DisplayName,@{label="TotalItemSize(KB)";expression={$_.TotalItemSize.Value.ToKB()}},ItemCount

You can use -Identity MAILBOXORUSERNAME, -Database DATABASEHERE, or -Server SERVERNAMEHERE. I chose server as it’s exactly what I needed.

If you delete a user on Exchange 2007, it will delete the user in Active Directory. It will not, however, delete the mailbox that was associated with the user. This mailbox will then move onto bigger and better things – namely just taking up storage space on your Exchange server.

Quick and easy way:
On your Exchange server, open up the Exchange Management Shell
Get-MailboxStatistics | where-object { $_.DisconnectDate -ne $null } | Select DisplayName,MailboxGuid – This will show all the disconnected mailboxes AND their associated MailboxGuid (which is needed to delete the boxes)
Remove-Mailbox -Database [Database-Name] -StoreMailboxIdentity [MailboxGuid] – This will delete a single line item.

EDIT 11.13.2008:
You can run the Get-MailboxDatabase command to find out the name of the database and what server it resides on. The final delete command will be something like the following:
Remove-Mailbox -Database "servername\mailbox database" -StoreMailboxIdentity 2ae3c6f1-848e-4892-923c-614f9b3838f7
Then it will ask if you want to really remove the GUID from the database.

Sometimes people complain that they are seeing the hidden formatting characters on emails they’re trying to send. And then they are worried that their customers will also see said formatting marks. While I can explain that the customer will only see the text and not the marks, it’s actually much easier to just solve the problem.

Word 2003 had it nice and easy – just click on the standard toolbar Paragraph Mark. But with 2007, everything is hidden or moved. Don’t get me wrong – I like 2007 so far, but finding various tasks that used to be easy to explain are now hidden away somewheres.

And finding the key combination to reset this is difficult because NO ONE WRITES ABOUT IT.

So here’s the key combination:
Alt + Shift + 8. Just press the magic keys somewhere in your word document (or in the body of an email) and like magic (sense a theme going on?) they show/hide at your command.