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Jul 13, 2005

How is an email address generated in Exchange ?

It's all based on your recipient policy. This is described very detailed in

285136 How to customize the SMTP e-mail address generators through recipient http://support.microsoft.com/?id=285136

However, there are couple things that are unclear in that article: what is alias, and where we get alias from?

When you create a new user, you are given the oppotunity to select an alias for the user, that alias is written into attribute "mailNickName". And mailNickName will be the first part of your primary smtp email address.

Then what will be the first part of the primary smtp address if we don't choose an alias? Your pre-Windows logon name, which corresponds to "samAccountName" will act as "mailNickName" by default.

Further to the post (Dec 6, 2006):
When will RUS consider a user object to be mailbox-enabled and try to stamp the other attributes?

Answer: Two attributes are needed: mailNickname + (msExchHomeServerName homeMDB homeMTA)

1. If the msExchHomeServer is not present, it is created based on the homeMDB or homeMTA, depending on which one is present.
2. After the msExchHomeServerName is set, the homeMDB and homeMTA attribute are populated if either one is missing.
3. The displayName is copied from mailNickname as is. The legacyExchangeDN goes through an algorithm that identifies the organization and administration group for the entry.
4. msExchMailboxGuid is created