Article ID: 324306
Article Last Modified on 2/28/2007
APPLIES TO
- Microsoft Exchange 2000 Enterprise Server
- Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Standard Edition
This article was previously published under Q324306
SUMMARY
This article describes how Exchange 2000, the Microsoft Web Storage System, and Exchange 2000 Installable File System (ExIFS) resolves Active Directory user objects from a URL. This process may occur in an unexpected way.
MORE INFORMATION
The Web Storage System URLs are constructed in the following manner:
Aliases do not necessarily represent a unique mailbox, and they have nothing to do with the data of the path user. User object Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) addresses are used to identify the path to a mailbox in Exchange 2000, and they must be unique (note that you may also use a secondary SMTP address for this purpose).
This match is done by adding the left hand side (LHS) of your mail attribute to the primary SMTP address from the default recipient policy. This must match any of the entries in your proxy addresses.
Therefore, the domain at the root of drive M (and correspondingly, the path to which the Exchange IIS virtual directory points) is used to identify which mailbox is being accessed.
Username@domain.com = left-hand-side@right-hand-side (or LHS@RHS)
In this example, the path to a user mailbox is M:\domain.com\mbx\username (in other words, M:\RHS\mbx\LHS).
Because the Exchange path points to M:\RHS\mbx, the full path to an item in the inbox is http://server/exchange/LHS/Inbox/item.eml
By default, user SMTP addresses are alias@recipientpolicy.com. M:\RHS\mbx\LHS maps to a unique user object's mailbox and is always addressable.
To test this, start the Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in, and then add a random, unique SMTP LHS address to a user object that you can access in drive M. For example, add UserA@microsoft.com to the Administrator account administrator@microsoft.com. Then, open a command prompt, go to the M: drive, and then type CD RHS\mbx\LHS of the secondary SMTP proxy you just added. In other words, log on to the server as the administrator and type CD microsoft.com\mbx\UserA. Note that you see the contents of the administrator account mailbox, even though you did not type that primary SMTP proxy address.
If you type http://server/exchange in the address bar of a browser, you are prompted for credentials. After you have supplied credentials, you see an HTML frames page that contains a left frame that has the source http://server/exchange/rhs/?cmd=navbar and a right frame that has the source http://server/exchange/rhs/inbox/?cmd=contents. The end user does not have to know more than the Exchange path (and even less if the URL is set as an Internet Explorer (IE) favorite or presented as a hotlink on a corporate Web page).
For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
293386 HTTP 401 or 404 error messages when you access OWA implicitly or explicitly
The domain.com is actually based on the default recipient policy. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
259589 XADM: How Installable File System Generates the Domain Name
Additional query words: MSAS OWA OMA exIFS WSS
Keywords: kbinfo KB324306
