MailTips are a new feature to Exchange 2010 and for the first time in a released version are viewable and testable by you. The Exchange 2010 RC was release yesterday and I have had a chance to see what they can do.
MailTips are manageable both at the Exchange Organization layer and at a per user (as a mail delivery target) layer. The management of MailTips will primarily be done with the new Exchange Control Panel (ECP), with minor forays into the tried and true Exchange Management Shell (EMS).
I took the first step of enabling MailTips for External Recipients with a EMS commands like below. This notifies all Outlook 2010 clients, and all OWA users that they are sending messages outside the organization when ever they add a contact or an email address outside the company to a mail message. It is a quick way to see MailTips work.
First check to see what your current setting is for External Recipients, second update as desired.
The remaining management of MailTips is done through the ECP on a per user or per contact basis. Accessing the ECP is done with https://<OWA URL>/ecp in a browser as an Exchange/Organizational Administrator. More info about the features of the new web based ECP can be found at MyBlog.
Accessing the ECP you navigate into the details of a user and scroll down and expand the MailTips section and add what ever plain text or custom HTML up to 175 characters in total length to get the point you desire across to your users.
In our case, we just want to let anyone emailing the President of the United States of America know that they are doing so, before they send the message.
This data is then stored in AD, in an Attribute on the target mail enabled end recipient user of the message, called msExchSenderHintTranslations as an entry in the Multi-valued String field
From looking at this info, it looks like multiple language translations can be stored in this attribute, and properly delivered to the sender of the message in their language of composition.
The same field is there on an email enabled contact in the organization.
And is stored in the same AD Attribute on the email enabled contact.
When a user in the company then tries to send a message to the POTUS or our “Do Not Reply” user they get notified, during message composition, encouraging them to consider their actions before sending the message.
A quick aside here is that the Outlook Web Access “Premium” view works in my testing on: Windows 7 client with Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.5.2 and Google Chrome 2.0.X. I wasn’t able to get OWA Premium to come up on a Windows version of Safari 4.
These same user helping MailTips will show with the Outlook 2010 client.
The other helpful MailTips are related to replies when you’ve been BCC’ed on a message, Replies to too many people, a Reply if someone has an Out of Office set, etc. Details about the settings at the organization are at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997443(EXCHG.140).aspx
