Assigning a primary user account to a mailbox

When you have a key employee go on vacation or leave the company, you may want to assign the authority to open that person's mailbox to someone else. But there's a problem; you cannot just change the authority, because the change won't take effect until the information store rereads the cache, which can be a long time after you physically make the change. So you have to change the time between reads of the cache, and that requires a change to the registry. Make sure you back up the registry, and, of course, make sure you have approval from the CIO. Once you do, the following procedure will get it done.

  • Execute Registry editor on the Exchange server.

  • Go To HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesMSExchangeISParametersSystem.

  • Click on the Edit menu.

  • Select Add Value. Enter Mailbox Cache Age Limit for value name.

  • Enter REG_DWORD for the Data type.

  • Enter 3 for Data then click OK. The "3" instructs the information store to reread the directory cache every three minutes. If the Exchange server has only one disk drive connected (meaning no type of disk redundancy established) then this number should be adjusted to possibly 15 minutes to avoid excessive drive reads which can reduce disk performance.

  • Exit from the Registry editor (save the changes of course).

  • Stop and then restart the information store service.

  • Now assign a new primary

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  • account to a mailbox:

    • Double-click on the user's mailbox .
    • Click on primary Windows Account.
    • Click on Select an existing Windows Account.
    • Click OK, then select the username from the user listing.

The new setting will now take effect within the time you specified.

About the author: Adesh Rampat has 10 years experience with network and IT administration. He is a member of the Association of Internet Professionals, the Institute for Network Professionals and the International Webmasters Association. He has also lectured extensively on a variety of topics.

Related Book

Administering Exchange 2000 Server
Author: Mitch Tulloch
Publisher: Osborne
Published: Feb 2001
Summary:
Microsoft Exchange Server is the leading messaging platform among Fortune 1000 companies, holding 44% of the marketshare
* Timed to follow release of Exchange 2000 Server, this book complements our Exchange 2000 Server: The Complete Reference and gives administrators task-based coverage of this messaging platform
* Covers all new features of this new product and addresses complexities introduced by Windows 2000--a must-have for administrators.

This was first published in June 2001

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