Friday, August 26, 2011

Windows XP logged Off Automatically After Sometime

The most common cause of this right now, is running a malware detection progam that deletes a file, but the registry still points at it. This, wsaupdater.exe, seems to be the most widely seen culprit, but it could potentially be other things, too.

Let's test it out.

Boot using your winxp cd.
Enter recovery console.
at the command prompt go to

C:/windows/system32

next type:
Dir *.exe

If you find, it, type

copy userinit.exe wsaupdater.exe

Exit and reboot normally. You should now be able to logon. 

Run regedit

Navigate to 
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\

In the right pane, you should see

C:\WINDOWS\System32\wsaupdater.exe,

Change it so that it reads:

C:\WINDOWS\System32\userinit.exe

That should solve the problem, if the malware was the one that caused the issue.

The scary thing is since more malware programs are inserting themselves into the winlogon key, this is going to be a moving target.


Logon - Logoff loop, also caused by BlazeFind

Another critical symptom caused by this malware: This malware modifies the Userinit area in the registry (replacing the userinit.exe with wsaupdater.exe) and Ad-Aware (with a particular definition update) removes the wsaupdater.exe file from the system, thus causing the Logon - Logoff loop. That is, when you login to Windows, the 'loading personal settings" verbose will appear, but suddenly it will logoff. This issue was documented clearly by Lavasoftusa in it's Lavahelp Knowledgebase. 

Here is the solution to the logon - logoff issue in Windows XP.

Enter the Recovery Console

Boot the system using the Windows XP CD-ROM. In the first screen when the Setup begins, read the instructions press "R" (in the first screen) enter the Recovery Console. Type-in the built-in Administrator password to enter the Console. You'll see the prompt reading C:\Windows (Or any other drive-letter where you've installed XP) 

Type the following command and press Enter.

CD SYSTEM32
(If that does not work, try CHDIR SYSTEM32)

COPY USERINIT.EXE WSAUPDATER.EXE

Quit Recovery Console by typing EXIT and restart Windows.

You'll be able to login successfully as you've created the wsaupdater.exe file (now, a copy of userinit.exe)

Now, change the USERINIT value in the registry (see Phase II in this page) and change it accordingly.


Cause:
Windows SA replaces userinit.exe used in logon with its own wsaupdater.exe. But uninstalling doesn't revert it back.
some adaware programs may also remove or quarantine wsaupdater.exe thinking that it's harmful.

Fix:
1. Boot using your winxp cd.
2. Enter recovery console.
3. at the command prompt go to
C:/windows/system32
4. next type: 

copy userinit.exe wsaupdater.exe
5. exit and reboot normally. You should now be able to logon. But you're not done yet!
6. run regedit
7. find the Userinit key in:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\
8. modify the entry:
C:\WINDOWS\System32\wsaupdater.exe
so that it reads:
C:\WINDOWS\System32\userinit.exe

That should do the trick! no reinstalling windows required!

how to use the VLOOKUP function in Excel

In this post, we’ll look at a slightly more complicated example and show a couple of tips and tricks for making VLOOKUP work correctly.
By the way, I’ve received a couple of comments and thanks for my previous post and just want to encourage readers to let me know if there are other examples of functions or situations they face that they need help with. They make a great source for future posts on this site :)
In our last example, we had a simple, two-column list of names and types of animals. In this post, we’ll take a look at a list of employee names and data, say, for calculating commissions for sales people. Here’s what our data looks like (on all images in this post, click to enlarge):


As you can see, we’re given employees’ last and first names, their base salaries, their bonus percentage, and the % of the year that they were employees. We’re also given a unique identifier in the form of an employee number. Let’s examine the data a bit further.
First, what we should notice is that there are employees with the same last and first names. There’s an Andrew Anderson as well as an Andrew Cobb. And a Penny and Jim Dee.
Remember that VLOOKUP will either return the first match it finds in a list. In this case, if we were to use VLOOKUP to lookup a list of last names or first names, VLOOKUP would always return Andrew Anderson’s data (if we were looking using the “First Name” field) or Penny’s data (if we were looking using the “Last Name” field).
So, what to do?

In this example, we’re lucky to have a unique identifier in the form of “Employee Number”. Each number is assigned only once to the employee, so this field would be a safe one to use for VLOOKUP. The only problem is that it’s located all the way at the end of the data, to the right of all the other fields. Remember that VLOOKUP has another criteria: whatever field you’re using to look up other data has to be to the left of all the other fields.
The easiest way to accomplish this is to insert a column to the left of “Last Name” (Column A) and copy-and-paste the “Employee Number” column there. Here’s how that would look, step by step:
Step 1: Select column F, where “Employee Number” data is located:


Step 2: Right-click on the mouse:


Step 3: Select “Copy” from the menu:


All of column F is now highlighted in a dotted line:


Step 4: Highlight column A:


Step 5: Right-click on the mouse once more:


Step 6: Select “Insert Copied Cells” on the menu


Step 7: The cells from column F are now copied over to column A, and everything is shifted over one column:


Now, employee numbers appear in both column A and G. Hit to get rid of the highlight around column G.


We’re now good to go!
By the way, if you had not had unique identifiers like employee numbers readily available, you could potentially use the  to “create” unique identifiers. CONCATENATE is a function that just munges two fields together. In this case, creating a unique identifier out of concatenating last name and first name would probably work.
Back to the tutorial. Suppose we had a second sheet that had a list of employee numbers for the four employees who had worked less than 100% during the year, and we wanted to calculate their bonuses for the year. Notice we swapped first and last name orders in this sheet and put the employee numbers in a different order:


We just want to fill in the data from the other source (possibly from another Excel sheet or workbook) in order to do the calculation. Here, I’ve left the original data in “Sheet1″ and am pulling the data into “Sheet2″.
What would we put into cell B2 in order to pull the data correctly? In the example in the last post, we only had two columns of data. In this example, we have seven, after copying over the employee numbers into the first column.
For the “First Name” column, we would be pulling data from column 3 in our data set (not column 2, which contains last names). So here’s what the VLOOKUP would look like for cell B2:

=VLOOKUP(A2,Sheet1!A1:G8,3,FALSE)

And here’s the excel step-by-step:
Step 1: Insert the VLOOKUP function by typing “=vlookup(” in cell B2:


Step 2: We’re looking up Employee Numbers, which are located in the previous column, so we put in A2 for cell B2:


Put in a “,” after this to move on to the next input for VLOOKUP called “table_array”.
Step 3: Now we need to highlight the area where all the data resides:


Put in a “,” after this to move on to the next input for VLOOKUP, called “col_index_num”.
Step 4: Remember that in this case, we need to reference column #3, where first names are located. We always start with the lookup value as column #1 and count toward the right.


Put in a “,” after this to move on to the final input for VLOOKUP.
Step 5: Finally, we want to put in “false” as the final input into VLOOKUP to tell it to look for exact matches.


Now close off the parenthesis to VLOOKUP, and the cell is automatically populated with the data we need.


The key now is to populate the rest of the cells. Can you figure out how to do this? One way would be to go through each cell and repeat the steps above. For example, to populate cell C2, we would write:

=VLOOKUP(A2,Sheet1!A1:G8,2,FALSE)

and so on, referencing each column where the data resides. (“Salary” resides in column 4, “bonus” in column 5, etc.) Another way would be to use Excel’s anchoring mechanism so that we could copy and paste formulas a bit more efficiently.
For example, for the rest of the cells under “First Name”, what we could do is write the following instead in B2:

=VLOOKUP($A2,Sheet1!$A$1:$G$8,3,FALSE)

What putting a “$” sign does in front of cell coordinates is to “lock” them in place. By putting $A2 instead of A2 in the first input section, we lock “A” in place (because all our employee numbers are in column A) and let the “2″ change as we go down the row.
By putting “$A$1:$G$8″ instead of “A1:G8″ as we originally had, we lock in the entire A1 to G8 cells in place and keep that section “locked” no matter where we put the formula.
If we then copy the formula down to cells B3 through B5, we don’t have to retype the formula each time. Similarly, you can copy the formula across each row, making sure to just change each column number so that you’re pulling the right data.
Here’s what the finished table would look like:


And here’s what the final column, which is just the total bonus calculation, would look like if we assumed that bonuses equaled salary * bonus * % of year worked:


In this example, we populated a new table in a new sheet with data from a separate sheet. But keep in mind one of the powerful things of VLOOKUP is that with a unique identifier such as “Employee Number”, what we could do is create an entirely new table with elements from multiple other tables that each contain “Employee Number”. For example, salary information might be stored in one place, and employee names in another. By using VLOOKUP to lookup employee numbers from each table, we could create one table that contains all information at once.
This has been a pretty lengthy example that’s actually covered a lot of different Excel tips, so we’ll stop here. If you have any specific questions or examples that you wouldn’t mind sharing (of course, all data would be disguised and I’d get your permission first), I’d be happy to answer them by creating a post with your example in the center.

Reporting Storage Size in Exchange

Let's begin

Before we start using ESEUTIL and ISINTEG ensure the following:
  • Make a backup of your Exchange databases even if you think the files are damaged and lost.
  • Use ISINTEG and ESEUTIL with some understanding about what these tools really do.
  • Ensure that you have done all other tests before you use ESEUTIL and ISINTEG.
  • Dismount the store (then it is accessible for offline defrag, tests and more).

Figure 1: Dismount the information store

ESEUTIL

ESEUTIL is a tool to defragment your exchange databases offline, to check their integrity and to repair a damaged/lost database.
ESEUTIL is located in the \EXCHSRVR\BIN directory. This directory is not in the system path so you must open the tool in the BIN directory or enhance the system path with the \EXCHSRVR\BIN directory.

Figure 2
: Change the system path to point to the \EXCHSRVR\BIN directory
ESEUTIL /D parameters

Figure 3: ESEUTIL parameters

Defrag

Exchange 2003 defragments the Exchange database every night. But this is only an online defrag of the database. An online defrag doesn’t reduce the size of the information store. To reduce the size of the databases, you must use an offline defrag.

When should I use an offline defrag?

Under normal conditions you don't need an offline defrag, but when you add tons of new users due to a merger or aquisition or when you delete many objects from the store it can be necessary to do an offline defrag.
You can do a space dump with ESEUTIL /MS to determine the space. Also ensure that you have 110% free diskspace associated with the Exchange database size.

Figure 4: ESEUTIL /MS
ESEUTIL parameters for defragmentation

Figure 5: ESEUTIL Defrag parameters
Depending on the size of the information store and your hardware, the defrag process can consume a lot of time.

Figure 6: ESEUTIL defragmentation status

Check the integrity of the Exchange database

You can check the integrity of your Exchange database with ESEUTIL /G.
Please read NOTE 1 carefully in the following screenshot.

Figure 7: ESEUTIL integrity check
To start the integrity check for the PRIV1.EDB database, type the following command:
ESEUTIL /G „C:\Program files\exchsrvr\mdbdata\priv1.edb“

Figure 8: ESEUTIL integrity check status

Disaster recovery

With a good backup in hand and Exchange databases and logfiles on different hard drives, it is no problem to recover from an Exchange disaster.
Just restore the data from backup and initiate a roll forward of the transaction logs. Well done, the Exchange information store goes online.
But what should you do when your backup isn't readable or you don't have a backup? Here's how these tools come to play.
Before you start:
  • Make sure that the databases are really not startable
  • Check the Application log for Exchange events that can tell you the cause of the failure
  • Make a backup of the database
  • Restart the server so that a soft recovery can be done
ESEUTIL /P parameters
ESEUTIL /p repairs a corrupted or damaged database. Ensure that you have a minimum of 20% free disc capacity in association to the Exchange database size.

Figure 9: ESEUTIL repair modus
Example:
ESEUTIL /P „c:\program files\exchsrvr\mdbdata\priv1.edb“ /Se:\exchsrvr\mdbdata\priv1.stm /Te:\tempdb.edb
This command will repair the database PRIV1.EDB. If you have no .STM file, you can create one with ESEUTIL /CREATESTM. Read more about this here.
After running ESEUTIL, you can open a detailled logfile called >database<.integ.raw to see the results.
As a last Step run ISINTEG –fix -test alltests. You can read more about ISINTEG later in this article.

ISINTEG

ISINTEG is used to do some tests on your information store and to fix some detected errors and problems.

Figure 10: ISINTEG parameters
ISINTEG is the only repair utility that understands the Exchange database as an Exchange database.
What does this mean? ESE is a generic database engine that can be used by different applications (Exchange, Active Directory).
ESEUTIL looks into the database as just another ESE database, and can see their tables and indexes. ESEUTIL just fixes the database tables.
Now it is time for ISINTEG. ISINTEG is aware of the relation between database tables and records that turn them into folders and messages.
After you run ISINTEG –FIX, you will see many warnings but you can safely ignore these messages. You should only pay attendtion to the end of ISINTEG. There should be zero errors reported. If there is an error, run ISINTEG again.
This example shows ISINTEG –test folder

Figure 11: ISINTEG –test folder

Monday, August 22, 2011

Mailbox Creation Exchange 2003 configuration step by step


And this is how to configure the Exchange Server to accept email for a domain like "mycompany.com" and cooperate with POPcon:

First install the Exchange server software from the CD or DVD. You may have to go back to the "Add/remove Software" utility in the control panel to add NNTP support if you did not do so during initial setup of your windows installation. Then open the Exchange System Manager and configure the new Exchange installation.

1. Adding your internet domain name to the recipient policies

Open the Exchange System-Manager. It should look like this:

One of the problems most often encountered when configuring an Exchange 2003 Server system is the fact that often the internet domain name you want to receive email for ("mycompany.com") does not match your standard active directory domain name (i.e. "servername.mycompany.com"). The Exchange 2003 Server component handling incoming emails - the SMTP server - does not accept emails for other domains than the ones entered in the "recipient policies", even if you entered the correct email addresses ("user@mycompany.com") in the active directory.
To make Exchange accept email for additional domains like your internet domain you need to add the domain names to the default recipient policy like this:

On the main tree panel of the Exchange system manager expand the tree "Recipients" and then click on "Recipient Policies". The policies will be shown on the right panel. Normally only the "Default Policy" will be there:



Open the properties of the "Default Policy" by double-clicking it:



In the Default Policy Properties please choose the tab "E-Mail Addresses". There you will find a list of domains supported by your exchange server. Usually only your internal active directory server domain will be listed here:


Like you can see, after installing our Exchange Server from scratch only our AD domain "Christensen.local" was listed as accepted SMTP address. But emails from the internet will be coming in addressed to "@mycompany.com" and not Christensen.local!

Choose "New..." here to add another accepted inbound domain. Since emails on the internet are sent via the SMTP protocol we want to add an "SMTP Address":


Now enter the domain name you want to receive email for. Please add a leading "@" to the domain name. This is what we entered to support emails addressed to @mycompany.com:



This is how the Default Policy Properties look like after entering the additional SMTP domain:



Enable the newly created entry with a check mark next to it:


When you OK the above dialog, Exchange will ask you with the next dialog box if you want to add the new address to all new users. Usually you do want exactly that to save some typing later.


Please note: You may need to restart your server to activate the new domain!

2. Configuring the SMTP server for inbound email

Next we will configure the SMTP-Server. This is the part of Exchange that accepts incoming emails from POPcon. No special settings are needed to work with POPcon but these are the standard settings in any case:

You will find the settings for the SMTP server under Servers/Protocols/SMTP/Default SMTP Virtual Server. Open the properties by right-clicking on the Default SMTP Virtual Server and choosing "Properties":

The settings on tab "General" can normally be left to the defaults.


On the tab "Access" you can find some configuration settings that might interfere with POPcon.




POPcon only works with a standard SMTP connection WITHOUT authentication, so allow "Anonymous access" in the "Authentication" dialog:



Choose "Connection" to grant or refuse the right to connect to the SMTP server to individual or multiple IP Address Ranges. Please ensure the system that runs POPcon does have the right to connect granted. With this setting ALL systems will have access to your SMTP server:



Under "Relay..." you can assign the right to relay through your SMTP-Server to some systems. This might be needed in some configuration and to be sure you should grant the system POPcon runs on relay rights. All other systems will need to authenticate before accessing the SMTP server to prevent unauthorized users using your system to relay spam:






Under the "Messages" tab you can restrict message size and number of messages accepted for each connection. Please make sure these settings are liberal enough to allow POPcon to transmit large messages to your server.

Also, on this tab you can choose an internal additional recipient for copies of the non-delivery reports. These NDRs will be sent back to senders of mails addressed to recipients unknown in your Exchange Server and they include a copy of the original message sent. You can use these postmaster copies of the NDRs to manually forward emails sent to mistyped recipients to the correct users.






Under tab "Delivery" some more configuration settings for outgoing emails can be found:





3. Adding the SMTP Connector for outbound emails

Now we need to add an SMTP-Connector (vs. SMTP Server) to handle outgoing email to the Internet.

Right-click "Connectors" in the Exchange System Manager and choose "New", "SMTP-Connector" to start adding the new connector and name it appropriately (like "SMTP-Out" in our case):



On the "General" tab you can now choose wether Exchange will send outgoing emails directly to the recipients system ("Use DNS...") or if all emails should be relayes through a SMTP relay server ("smart host").
The first option, DNS, is more direct but can sometimes cause problems when you use a dialup internet connection because some recipient systems will not accept emails that are coming from your ISP's dialup IP range while pretending to come from your real internet domain. Sending via your ISP's smart host / smtp relay server is the better option in this case. We choose our ISPs smtp relay server here.



Also, on this tab you need to add the "local bridgehead" server (as shown above)
On the tab "Address Space" we need to add a wildcard address space for SMTP. We want to allow emails to any domain, so we use the wildcard "*" here:

Side note about the "Cost" entry: If you want to send emails to some domains via a different route you can create multiple SMTP connectors and set the "Cost" entry of this wildcard connector to a higher value while setting the cost entry of the special domain route to a lower cost but with only the special domain allowed on this page. This is especially useful if you generally want to send via DNS and only route to some systems that won't accept your email via some relay server.

If your ISP's SMTP server requires authentication (and almost all of them do today) you can set the username and password on the "Advanced" tab of the SMTP connector. Select "Outbound Security":



Select "Basic authentication" and chose "Modify" to enter the username and password:






And that's already it - Your Exchange is now configured to send email to the internet and receive an SMTP email feed like it will come from POPcon or a direct internet connection. All you should do now is configure your users' email addresses in the Active directory.



4. Configuring your users' email addresses in the Active Directory

You can set one or multiple email addresses for each user to receive email at. We will step through the necessary actions when creating a new user called John Galt.
First open the active directory and right-click the "Users" item to select "New", "User":
[Image]
The resulting dialog will allow you to create a new AD user to log into your server and creates an Exchange mailbox all in one wizard pass:
[Image]
Next...
 
[Image]
Next...
 
[Image]
Now the wizard continues into the Exchange Server realm and lets us create a new exchange mailbox
 
We just accepted the default alias here. Next...
 
[Image]
Ok, fine - but wait: What about our desired email address? john@servolutions.com? We need to add this mail address manually. We are back at the AD configuration console and select the properties of our new user "John Galt" by right-clicking on the name:
 
[Image]

Lots of tabs on this resulting dialog:
 
[Image]
We go to the "E-mail Addresses" tab:
 
[Image]
 
And surprise: john@servolutions.com is already there, but in suspiciously non-bold print. Actually, Exchange automatically entered this additional email address because we chose so during the editing of the default recipient policies. But we want this address to be the primary address meaning all email sent by John will get this address as the "senders" and "reply" addresses in the mail headers. So we click on "Set As Primary" and are done:
 
[Image]
We could also add more email addresses like info@servolutions.com or sales@servolutions.com but only one of these addresses can be the primary address that will be the default senders' address in all emails sent out by John.
And that's really it - just step through your other user's AD entries and set the appropriate primary and additional email addresses.



5. Installing and configuring POPcon or POPcon PRO

After going through the above 4 steps your Exchange is configured to send out email but it still can't pull down email from POP3 or IMAP mailboxes on your provider server. For this you need to install and configure POPcon.
Configuring POPcon is quite straightforward. You need to follow these steps:
a) Configure a Postmaster email address on the GENERAL configuration tab.
b) Add one or more POP3 mailboxes on the POP3/IMAP tab.
c) Configure the Exchange server name on the EXCHANGE configuration tab.

Download and run the self-extracting installer of POPcon or POPcon PROand follow the instructions during the installation. It will install the POPcon Administrator program and the POPcon service that runs in the background on your system.
Run POPcon Adminstrator from Start > Programs > POPcon
POPcon Administrator

POPcon Screenshot

Click on "Configure" to open up the POPcon configuration screen.

a) Configure a Postmaster email address on the GENERAL configuration tab.

Screenshot of general options tab in POPcon PRO
On this first configuration page you only need to enter the email address of your Postmaster or Administrator user. The Postmaster will receive all emails without a valid recipient as well as general POPcon status notifications. It is very important to define a real email address from inside your exchange server here because mails can be lost irretrievably if POPcon forwards some mail with no recipient information to the postmaster and that account does not exist in your exchange server.
You can leave the log file options to their default settings for now.
Next go to the POP3/IMAP tab to configure the POP3 or IMAP mailbox accounts you want POPcon to download email from.

b) Add one or more POP3 mailboxes on the POP3/IMAP tab.

POPcon PRO POP3 accounts configuration screenshot
POPcon PRO collects mail from as many POP3 accounts you like. Just click on Add to add another POP3 host or account to the list of Polled POP3 Hosts. For each server or account you need to fill in the POP3 server settings as shown below.
If you are using catch-all style mailboxes (mailboxes that receive email for a whole domain, regardless of the recipient part before the "@") POPcon needs to filter recipients from incoming mail so only the recipients at your own internet domain are accepted. Please add the domain you consider your own in the "Accepted Recipient Domains" box. This is the same domain you configured earlier in the Exchange Default Policy.

Individual accounts settings

This dialog lets you input the specifics about a POP3 or an IMAP server you want to have polled by POPcon PRO.
This is the information POPcon PRO needs to know about each server:
Server type:
Here you can select on the four supported server types:
POP3: Default. POP3 servers are by far the most common mail server types on the internet.
POP3-SSL: Some POP3 Servers need SSL encryption enabled for the connection in order to protect passwords and sensitive information. Choose this type to have a SSL-encrypted connection to a POP3 server.
IMAP: IMAP Servers are also quite common and theoretically allow the client to manipulate email folders and move email between folders online. In our case the protocol is used to download email from the INBOX of the IMAP server to your exchange server.
IMAP-SSL: Supports SSL connections to IMAP servers for added protection.

Access:
Configure the server name, account name and password to connect to the mail server here.
Servername: The name the server you want to have polled. You can also enter the IP address directly.
Username: The username needed to log into your POP3 or IMAP mail server.
Password: The password needed to log into your mail server.
IP portnumber: Almost always the TCP/IP port for POP3 mail is 110. Under some circumstances, internet routers or firewalls change the port number. Please ask your network administrator or internet provider. The standard port for POP3-SSL is 995, for IMAP it is 143 and for IMAP-SSL this should be set to 993.
Timeout: Leave this to the default value.
Please ask your POP3 mailbox hosting provider if you do not have the above information.

Type of mailbox / distribution:
POPcon PRO supports both catch-all and single user mailboxes
Catch-all mailbox ("*@domainname.com"): For this type of mailbox, POPcon PRO will distribute the emails retrieved from this server according to what it finds in the TO:, CC:, BCC: and other header-fields of the mail. If you choose this option, don’t forget to add your internet domain name(s) to the "Accepted Recipient Domains" box on the POP3/IMAP configuration dialog
Single user mailbox ("user@domainname.com"):This type of mailbox receives email for only one specific Exchange mailbox. You need to specify the receiver of the email here. POPcon PRO will then direct all mail retrieved from this server to the recipient email address given here.

Delete / Keep email on the server:
This block allows you to configure POPcon PRO to either delete email after downloading or keep it on your POP3 or IMAP server for a specified amount of time or indefinitely.
Delete downloaded email: This is the default setting – POPcon PRO will delete the Email on your POP3 or IMAP server after successfully downloading it.
Leave a copy of downloaded email (indefinitely):This option will cause POPcon PRO to leave a copy of the email on the server. Only use this option during testing or when you are sure the mail will be deleted eventually, i.e. by another system periodically downloading and deleting email.
Leave a copy of downloaded email for n number of days: Causes POPcon PRO to leave a copy of the email on the POP3/IMAP server for the specified number of days before deleting it. You can use this option to allow access to a single POP3 or IMAP mailbox by two different systems.

c) Configure the Exchange server name on the EXCHANGE configuration tab.

POPcon PRO SMTP/Exchange settings screenshot

On this configuration screen you can specify the Exchange™-(SMTP) Server you want the mail to be directed to. Normally this will be the computer name of your Exchange™ server (like "MYSERVER").
You can leave all other settings default

These three steps to configure POPcon will provide you with a working set-up. Test it out by confirming the new configuration with OK and then use the "Trigger mail retrieval" button on the POPcon Administrator main screen to start the first mail download. You can follow what is happening in the scrolling log display on that screen. Watch out for any error messages there. There is also a POPcon log file (c:\program files\POPcon\POPconSrv.log – open with notepad) that you can view at your leisure.

6. Check out the ChangeSender Outlook Add-in

ChangeSender Exchange Send-as Add-in adds one important piece of functionality to Microsoft Outlook when used with Exchange Server: It allows you to send as any of your email addresses and even group addresses or those of other users if allowed by the administrator. Effectively this is the Exchange Send-as function without the limitations of the ActiveDirectory
Without the ChangeSender Exchange send-as component, Exchange always sends out emails on your default email address fixed in the ActiveDirectory even when answering emails received on one of your additional email addresses. Also, Exchange does not allow sharing the same email address (i.e. department-wide or company-wide email addresses) between users. ChangeSender solves both problems by adding a configurable "send as" selection box to your Outlook email form.

ChangeSender Features
  • Automatically selects the right send-as address when replying to emails. ChangeSender uses the address of the original email as sender address for replies.
  • Easy selection of send as addresses for new emails via a new sender address selection box in Outlook.
  • Multiple users can send from the same sender address (i.e. send as sales@yourcompany.com or support@yourcompany.com)
  • Sender appearance fully configurable as "Any name" <any@address.com> for each individual email address. Does notshow up as "sent on behalf of...".
  • Very simple installation and administration.
  • Administrator can restrict or allow user choices for the sender address and prevent users from sending as other users.
  • Works with Exchange 2010, 2007, 2003, 2000 and with Outlook 2010, 2007, 2003, 2002, 2000 versions.

ChangeSender in Outlook 2007 screenshot

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