• Article

Recipient Policies

Topic Last Modified: 2008-12-12

A policy is a collection of settings that are applied to one or more Exchange configuration objects of the same class in the Active Directory directory service. There are two types of policies: system policies and recipient policies.

Recipient policies are used in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 to automatically control the generation of e-mail addresses for recipient objects. The following are recipient objects:

  • Mail-enabled users
  • Contacts
  • Groups
  • Public folders

Recipient policies enable you to create multiple addresses for a given address type. They also provide a set of LDAP-based filter rules. These rules enable you to select the set of recipients to which the recipient policy will apply.

By using recipient policies, you can perform the following tasks:

  • Add a new address type to the default recipient policy. This creates additional e-mail addresses of the new address type for new and existing users.
  • Create a new recipient policy that can be applied selectively to a set of users. For example, you can create a specific LDAP address that will be created for all users in Marketing, or in Rome, or whose first names begin with the letter M.
  • Modify default e-mail addresses for existing recipients and designate new primary e-mail addresses.

Recipient policies are automatically applied to recipient objects by the Address List Service, at intervals scheduled by an administrator. For more information about this service, see Address List Service.

Note

This feature was called Recipient Update Service in Exchange Server 2003 and earlier versions of Exchange Server.

Default Recipient Policy

When you install Exchange 2007, a default recipient policy is created that will generate the default e-mail addresses for all recipient objects in your Exchange 2007 organization.

The default recipient policy will always generate SMTP and X.400 addresses for recipient objects. It might also generate default addresses for address types that are served by gateways or connectors on the system.

New Recipient Policies

If you have created several recipient policies, each will be assigned a priority in the order in which they were created. You can modify these priorities to control how they will be applied. The lowest priority number has the highest priority. For example, a recipient policy that is assigned priority number 1 is a higher priority than a recipient policy that is assigned priority number 2 or 3. Only one recipient policy will be applied to each user in the system. If more than one recipient policy applies to the user, the one with the highest priority will be applied. For example, Jonathan Mollerup is a new user who works in the Public Relations department of Humongous Insurance in Chicago. His alias is jmoll.

Note

By default, every recipient policy creates a primary X.400 and SMTP address, along with the custom e-mail addresses that it creates, for each recipient to which it applies. These addresses are derived from the primary addresses that are specified in the default recipient policy. They cannot be deleted. You can designate a custom e-mail address to be the primary address for a user in the Active Directory Users and Computers tool.

  • The recipient policy named Chicago creates SMTP addresses of the form alias@chicago.HumongousInsurance.com for all recipients in the Chicago location. It has a priority of 2.
  • The recipient policy named PublicRelations creates SMTP addresses of the form alias@publicrelations.HumongousInsurance.com for all users in the Public Relations department. It has a priority of 1.
  • The default policy creates an SMTP address in the form alias@HumongousInsurance.com and an X.400 address for all users in the HumongousInsurance domain. It has a priority of Lowest.

Because the Chicago recipient policy has the highest priority, this is the policy that will be applied to e-mail address generation for Jonathan. He will receive messages addressed to the following addresses:

  • SMTP:jmoll@HumongousInsurance.com
  • SMTP:jmoll@chicago.HumongousInsurance.com
  • X.400:c=us;a=MCI;p=HumongousInsurance;o=northamerica;s=jmoll