Every time someone leaves your organisation, you’ll probably need to forward their mail to another mailbox, but over time this can get disorganised and messy. Use the below command to extract a .csv formatted table of mailboxes that have a forwarding address:
Get-Mailbox -resultsize 6000 | Where {$_.ForwardingAddress -ne $null} | Select Name, ForwardingAddress, organizationalunit, whencreated, whenchanged, DeliverToMailboxAndForward | export-csv E:\forwardedusers.csv
I set a limit of 6000 because we have almost that many mailboxes, and the limit in this case is the number of mailboxes this will query, rather than the number of actual results. I’m sure this means that there’s a more efficient way of running this query, but it’s not like you’re doing this every day, so it doesn’t really matter.
Once you’ve got this information, you might want to match this up with further details about the users that own these mailboxes. Use the Active Directory powershell tools with Server 2008 to extract this information.
Fire up a powershell on a domain controller (or remotely), and run “import-module activedirectory”.
Then execute:
Get-Aduser -SearchBase "DC=yourdomain,DC=local" -properties SamAccountName,description | export-csv c:\allusers.csv
At the “Filter:” prompt, type:
name –like “*”
Than get this data into excel in two different worksheets.
Use the VLOOKUP tool to compare the two worksheets (in a third one), and collate the fields for the user’s name, forwarding address, and description:
In your “working worksheet” make the first column pull the display name from the mail worksheet, then name the second column “description” (this is what I’m looking for, anyway), and the third columns can be any other data you’d like to show, such as OU, modified dates, or suchlike.
In the description column, enter:
=VLOOKUP(mail!A2,allusers!$D:$E,2,FALSE)
“mail” refers to the worksheet containing data extracted from Exchange, and A2 should be the first user’s Name field (copy this downwards to that you’re looking up A3, A4, A5, etc.
“allusers” refers to the Active directory information worksheet – so in this case it will attempt to match the mail A2 field with anything in the D column in allusers (this being the first column in the $D:$E array, and will then return the corresponding value from the E column in allusers (because I’ve specified “2”, which in my case is the description field.) The FALSE bit at the end ensures that you’re searching for an exact match.
Copy this formula down along with the list of users that have email forwarding enabled, and you’ll have a list of forwarded users along with their names, descriptions, modified dates, OUs, and any other data you like.