Can't find how to remove forwarding

Question

I have inherited a SBS2003 server from another tech. He created a user named Customer Service, and somehow configured mail sent to this account to be forwarded to 2 internal users, lets call them Chris and Jason. Jason has left the company and the bosses don't like seeing his address shown in the recipient field of emails that are sent to Customer Service.

I can't find how the emails are being forwarded. In Delivery Options, no forwarders are configured. I've used Adsiedit to look through every single attribute and can't find any trace of something related. No aliases have been configured. There are no rules configured in anyone's outlook. These searches have been performed for all 3 accounts. The only thing that has been changed from default is that Chris and another employee have been given mailbox rights to Customer Service so they can open the mailbox if they want to. Where else can I look to find and remove Jason from the list of recipients that are forwarded to? This one has me stumped.

thanks for your help!

Yep its a regular user account. They only have one DG that includes all employees in the company. External senders email the account customerservice@domain.com and it goes to Chris and Jason, in addition to the customerservice mailbox. There is also nothing funky going on at the webhost level, which is external. Simply an mxrecord that points any mail to our exchange server like normal. — user94601, Sep 14 '11 at 02:29

joeqwerty · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-14T00:54:24.020

4

The forwarding options on a mailbox enabled user don't allow for forwarding to multiple recipients (that I'm aware of) so my guess, based on the fact that two users are listed in the recipient field, is that this is actually a ditribution group. Have you verified that Customer Service is a user mailbox and not a Distibution Group?

Try creating a custom query in Active Directory Users and Computers with the following query string:

proxyaddresses=smtp:emailaddress@domain.com, substituting the email address that these emails are being sent to in order to find the object with the email address.

edited Sep 14 '11 at 00:54

answered Sep 14 '11 at 00:01

joeqwerty

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I had already tried that, the only thing that comes up is the single account, which is not a distro. – user94601 Sep 14 '11 at 02:30
1

OK, set up an Outlook profile to open this mailbox and start Outlook as such: "outlook.exe /cleanrules" (without the quotes) and see if that fixes it. – joeqwerty Sep 14 '11 at 02:37
Yep that did it. I swear I checked the rules on that account but I guess not. thanks! – user94601 Sep 14 '11 at 02:56
Glad to help. I use this as a last resort and it often fixes the issue. – joeqwerty Sep 14 '11 at 04:00

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 14 '11 at 04:35

To expand on joeqwerty's answer:

Exchange provides users the ability to configure server-side rules for managing mail. This allows mail to be forwarded or autoreplied (i.e., vacation message) without the need for an email client to be running.

It's possible that the Customer Service user has a server-side forwarding rule set up in its Exchange mailbox.

You'll need to log in to Exchange using Outlook or Outlook Web Access using the Customer Service user credentials. Look in the Tools/Rules and Alerts menu item (Rules folder in OWA) for a rule that effects the forwarding.

Can't find how to remove forwarding

2 Answers2