Understanding Recipient Restrictions
Applies to: Exchange Server 2010 SP3, Exchange Server 2010 SP2
You can configure restrictions on the recipients in your organization. These restrictions allow you to use recipients consistent with your organization's policies.
Looking for management tasks related to managing Mailbox servers? See Managing Mailbox Servers.
Contents
Message Size Restrictions
Message Delivery Restrictions
Maximum Recipients per Message Restrictions
Mailbox Size Restrictions
Public Folder Size Restrictions
Message Size Restrictions
Restrictions on the size of a message are the most commonly used restrictions in any messaging system. Setting a maximum message size prevents your messaging system, or the underlying network infrastructure, from being overwhelmed.
Depending on what you want to do, you can configure message size restrictions for several components. For example, you can restrict the total size of a message or the size of the individual message components (such as the message header, attachments, or the number of recipients).
Although you can also specify whether message size restrictions are applied to your entire Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 organization or to a specific connector or user object, this section focuses only on message size restrictions that you can apply to recipients. For a complete list of message size restrictions that you can configure in an Exchange 2010 organization, see Understanding Message Size Limits.
When configuring message size restrictions for individual recipients, it's important to consider other message size restrictions that may exist in your organization. For example, assume that the Hub Transport servers in your organization are configured to restrict message size to 10 megabytes (MB). In this case, for a mail contact that has external addresses, you should set the maximum receive size to be no larger than 10 MB. Although a sender in your organization will be able to submit a message larger than 10 MB to this mail contact, the message would be rejected by the Hub Transport server. To learn more about how different message size restrictions affect each other and the order of precedence, see Understanding Message Size Limits.
Message Size Restrictions for All Recipient Types
Exchange 2010 can deliver or route messages to all recipients. Therefore, you can set a maximum receiving message size limit for any recipient type in your Exchange organization. If a sender attempts to send a message that's larger than the specified size, the message is returned to the sender with a descriptive error message.
In the Exchange Management Console (EMC), you set the maximum receiving message size by using the Mail Flow Settings tab of the recipient's properties. In the Exchange Management Shell, use the MaxReceiveSize parameter of the appropriate Set- cmdlet. For an example about how to configure receiving message size restrictions for a recipient, see Configure Message Size Limits for a Mailbox or a Mail-Enabled Public Folder.
Message Size Restrictions Specific to Mailboxes and Mail-Enabled Public Folders
Mailboxes and mail-enabled public folders are the only recipient types that can submit messages to your Exchange messaging system. Therefore, in addition to setting receiving message size restrictions, you can also set sending message size restrictions.
In the EMC, you set the maximum sending message size of a mailbox by using the Mail Flow Settings tab of the mailbox properties. In the Shell, use the MaxSendSize parameter of the Set-Mailbox and Set-MailPublicFolder cmdlets. For an example about how to configure sending message size restrictions for mailboxes and mail-enabled public folders, see Configure Message Size Limits for a Mailbox or a Mail-Enabled Public Folder.
Important
If you implement sending message size restrictions for your mailbox users, you should also make sure that your Client Access servers are configured to accept client requests that are equal to or larger than the sending message size limit that you configured. Microsoft Office Outlook Web App uses ASP.NET and is thereby affected by the ASP.NET configuration. ASP.NET has a setting, maxRequestLength, which determines the maximum amount of data that the Web browser can submit to the Client Access server. If this limit is lower than the sending message size restriction, your users may receive a confusing error. To learn more about managing the maximum message size in Outlook Web App, see Configure Maximum Message Size in Outlook Web App.
Public Folder Management Console
The Public Folder Management Console is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) 3.0-based interface that provides Exchange administrators with a graphical user interface (GUI) to create, configure, and manage public folders. You can also configure message size restrictions for a mail-enabled public folder by using the Message Size Restrictions option on the Mail Flow Settings tab of the public folder properties in the Public Folder Management Console. To learn more about the Public Folder Management Console, see Using the Public Folder Management Console.
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Message Delivery Restrictions
With Exchange 2010, you can place restrictions on how messages are delivered to individual recipients. Message delivery restrictions apply to all recipient types and can be useful for controlling access to specific recipients in your Exchange 2010 organization. For example, several organizations specify that only a small set of users can send messages to large distribution groups.
You can configure the following message delivery restrictions for a recipient:
Accept messages from a specific list of senders If you specify a list of senders from which to accept messages, the recipient will receive messages only from those senders. By default, all recipients are configured to accept messages from all senders.
Use this restriction for recipients for which you want only a small number of authorized senders to be able to send messages. For example, you may want to configure a distribution group that contains all the employees in your organization to accept messages from only specific employees in the Human Resources department who are responsible for company-wide communications. Another scenario where you can use this restriction is for mail contacts that represent suppliers for a retail organization. You may want to configure each of these mail contacts to accept messages from only the buyers who work directly with those suppliers.
Reject messages from a specific list of senders If you specify a list of senders from which to reject messages, the recipient will reject messages from those senders. By default, all recipients are configured not to reject messages from any senders.
Note
This restriction overrides the Accept messages from a specific list of senders restriction. If a sender is listed in both lists, any messages sent by that sender will be rejected.
Use this restriction to block specific users from sending messages to specific recipients. For an example about how this restriction is useful, consider the following scenario. You create a distribution group called All Employees. You configure that distribution group to accept messages from only those senders that are a member of the Human Resources distribution group. However, the Human Resources distribution group also includes mailboxes for interns whom you don't want to allow access to the All Employees distribution group. Therefore, to prevent the intern mailboxes from sending messages to the All Employees distribution group, you can specify the intern mailboxes when configuring the Reject messages from a specific list of senders restriction for the All Employees group.
Require that all senders are authenticated If you configure a recipient to require that all senders are authenticated, any messages from senders that don't have valid logon credentials in your organization will be rejected. By default, only new distribution groups and dynamic distribution groups are configured to require all senders to be authenticated.
Note
In previous versions of Exchange, by default, no recipients were configured to require all senders to be authenticated. Therefore, any distribution groups that you migrate from a previous version of Exchange won't have this restriction configured.
Use this restriction to specify that recipients receive messages only from internal senders that have been successfully authenticated. For example, to prevent messages that originate outside of your Exchange organization from being delivered to distribution groups that are used for internal communications, you can configure these groups to require sender authentication.
For details about how to configure message delivery restrictions for a recipient, see Configure Message Delivery Restrictions.
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Maximum Recipients per Message Restrictions
It can take a significant amount of time for a Hub Transport server to route messages that are addressed to a large number of recipients. As a result, this may affect the performance of the Hub Transport server, which could impact the overall message delivery in your Exchange organization.
To eliminate this risk, you can restrict the number of recipients that are allowed per message. Although you can configure this restriction at the mailbox level, you can also configure it at a higher level, such as the organization level, connector level (only for Receive connectors), and Hub Transport server level. Generally, it's a best practice to configure this setting at a higher level and use the mailbox-level configuration only for exceptions. For more information about the different levels at which you can configure this restriction, as well as a list of default values, see Understanding Message Size Limits.
For details about how to configure maximum recipients per message restrictions for a mailbox, see Restrict the Number of Recipients per Message.
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Mailbox Size Restrictions
You can configure storage quotas for mailboxes. By using storage quotas, you can control the size of mailboxes and manage the growth of mailbox databases. For detailed steps about how to configure storage quotas for a mailbox, see Configure Storage Quotas for a Mailbox.
Note
You can also configure storage quotas at the mailbox database level. The quotas that you configure for a mailbox database apply to all mailboxes in that database, unless the mailbox is configured not to use mailbox database defaults. Generally, it's a best practice to configure storage quotas at the mailbox database level and use the mailbox level configuration only for exceptions. For detailed steps about how to configure storage quotas for a mailbox database, see Configure Mailbox Database Properties.
Because storage quotas have a direct impact on your storage capacity planning, you must plan your storage quotas carefully. Storage quotas, number of mailboxes per mailbox database, and the storage subsystem that hosts each mailbox database are all factors that you should consider when planning your deployment.
Before deploying Unified Messaging (UM) in your Exchange organization, you must review any existing storage quotas you've configured. Because Windows Media Audio (WMA) and waveform audio (.wav) files are attached to each voice message, voice messages may be larger than e-mail messages. As a result, voice messages may cause user mailboxes to exceed their quota more quickly than e-mail messages that don't include attachments. To learn more about the impact of Unified Messaging on storage quotas, see Understanding Storage Quotas and Voice Mail.
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Public Folder Size Restrictions
Similar to mailboxes, you can configure storage quotas for your mail-enabled public folders. By using storage quotas, you can control the size of mail-enabled public folders and manage the growth of public folder databases.
In addition to storage quotas, you can also define age limits for your public folders. If you specify an age limit for a public folder, any items in that public folder that exceed the age limit without having been modified are removed automatically from that public folder. This provides administrators with an additional option for controlling the growth of their public folder databases. For detailed steps about how to configure storage quotas and age limits for public folders, see Configure Public Folder Properties.
Note
Storage quotas and age limits also apply to public folders that aren't mail-enabled.
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