Exchange mail arriving at unintended users inbox

[gaz350]

Just had a case of an email from a member of staff arriving at the intended staff members inbox AND the students inbox she was talking(ranting) about.

 

This email was not intended to go to the student!!

our staff have usernames jdoe and students 04johndoe. all users have 1st name and Surname fields populated in AD.

 

Now i think this is a case of accidental use of the title going into the Bcc or something. no title on the email.

 

but does exchange try and be helpful? so say if she had accidently put "John Doe" in the BCC field it will try and find someone to send it to? anyone know how this happened and if it is a feature how do you turn it off!!

 

she was using OWA. Anyone any ideas on this 1?

[SYNACK]

Outlook will lookup the names in the to, CC and BCC fields if they are not proper email addresses. It will search through the global address list (GAL) and assign the name to the email address. For example typing in princip in the to box on our system will direct the email to the Principal as that is the only possible match in the GAL. No idea how to turn it off though if there is an option it should be under "check names" or similar as I think that is what the feature is called. Edited January 22, 2008 by SYNACK
Added example

[comedydave]

Just had a case of an email from a member of staff arriving at the intended staff members inbox AND the students inbox she was talking(ranting) about.

 

This email was not intended to go to the student!!

our staff have usernames jdoe and students 04johndoe. all users have 1st name and Surname fields populated in AD.

 

Now i think this is a case of accidental use of the title going into the Bcc or something. no title on the email.

 

but does exchange try and be helpful? so say if she had accidently put "John Doe" in the BCC field it will try and find someone to send it to? anyone know how this happened and if it is a feature how do you turn it off!!

 

she was using OWA. Anyone any ideas on this 1?

 

As far as i know, outlook and exchange will look for perfect name matches. I have never known it to pick "next best" ie. you put in "John Doe", and the entry in AD/Exchange is "Mr John Doe"

[gaz350]

seems sending an email to "John Doe" via OWA and OUTLOOK will send an email to 00johndoe if the firstname is set to John and Surname is Doe.

does not appear to work via any other mail clients.

 

Removing the users Firstname and Surname entry in Active Directory seems to stop this from happening.

 

any other work arounds would be greatly recieved!

Edited January 22, 2008 by gaz350

[Ric_]

@gaz350: IMHO, you are looking for a solution to a problem that isn't really there. The user entered the child's name into the wrong field... short of watching everyone type there emails and doublechecking that they REALLY want to send the email to who they have said they want to, there is little you can do.

 

Should the teacher have been ranting about a pupil too? Is email really the correct way to discuss these matters? There's a whole can of worms opened up here!

[gaz350]

Sorry Ric i do believe i am looking for a solution to a problem that is there, at the moment Staff often send emails to heads of departments/year with students names in the title, they are human, so sometimes under pressure, they make mistakes if this person was using Thunderbird the email would just bounce, but using OWA and Outlook connected via exchange the student would receive the email.

 

for the head this is a problem. An IT problem for him is a problem for me that needs a solution. We have a spread out site so staff use email a lot for discussing problem students.

 

Unbelievably this was the 1st time this had happened and obviously he wants the risk of it happening again to be almost ZERO (apart from actually entering the students username in the to, cc, bcc fields)

 

Should the teacher have been ranting about a pupil too? Is email really the correct way to discuss these matters? There's a whole can of worms opened up here!

I agree but we all rant on here and perhaps is a bit off topic for this thread

[SYNACK]

You may be able to fix this by changing the Global Address list to exclude the students. That should stop the lookup from resolving them from their names. Or maybe an easier solution would be hiding the CC and BCC bars from the staff as all of these options obviously overwhelm them

[OutToLunch]

I believe the feature is ANR - http://www.msexchange.org/articles/Ambiguous-Name-Resolution.html

 

I've never had it cause problems, but I'm assuming you could reverse the process described in the article for adding extra fields and remove all fields from ANR indexing instead - or ask an Exchange guru how to disable it...

[gaz350]

I believe the feature is ANR - http://www.msexchange.org/articles/Ambiguous-Name-Resolution.html

 

I've never had it cause problems, but I'm assuming you could reverse the process described in the article for adding extra fields and remove all fields from ANR indexing instead - or ask an Exchange guru how to disable it...

 

Thanks at least i know whats happening now.