Hello Microsoft,

I'm having an issue with SBS Server 2008.  This SBS 2008 server was migrated from an SBS 2003 server.  Now in 2008 when trying to edit the user account I am getting the following error:

Invalid Email Address

This e-mail alias already exists. Type a different e-mail alias.

I deleted the user account, recreated him.  When trying to recreate the user using the Windows SBS Console I get the same error:

When creating the user account using Active Directory Users and Computers, and the mailbox from Exchange Management Console all is ok.

I piped the following output from Exchange Management Shell into a text file then searched through it for the users email address.

Get-Mailbox | select PrimarySmtpAddress, WindowsEmailAddress, EmailAddresses, UserPrincipalName, Alias | fl > C:\email.txt

I found nothing in here.  I also searched the registry for this alias, nothing came back in my search results.

I used systeminternals process monitor and monitored the SBS Adduser.exe application.  I found it was communicating with a database file C:\Windows\System32\activeds.tlb.  I think this is where the problem lies, this database file contains the user alias as existing even though it doesn't exist in AD.

Can someone at Microsoft please give me some feedback?

There are other posts on this, but nothing is relevant, or has a fix.  Here is another user experiancing the same problem:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsserver2008r2management/thread/907bd323-c3fe-4ec2-af33-271ab309b338

I haven't had a chance to reproduce this yet, but my understanding is that the SBS console will refresh every 24 hours.  So if you create an account with an email address, delete that account via ADUC instead of the SBS console, and then attempt to recreate the account, the create process will fail because the SBS console still thinks the account exists.  If you wait 24 hours, or if you make sure to always delete accounts via the console and not via ADUC, you won't see this.

When I get a spare moment, I'll attempt to reproduce and verify this weekend.

If I remember correctly, you need to delete the account from within the Exchange Management Console. By doing it there, it cleans up both the AD and the Exchange Organization. The problem with doing it via Active Directory Users and Computers is that it doesn't clean up Exchange. (This, by the way, is the opposite of how we're used to doing things in the SBS 2003 days if for some reason we used native tools instead of the SBS tools.)

It is true that deleting the account via ADUC will not clean up exchange. BUT, (and I'll test this later this evening), the exchange portion is just a mailbox in a database. The SMTP address is an Active Directory property and so it gets deleted when the account is deleted via ADUC. The mailbox is left in a dicsonnected state and no mail would get delivered to it and no SMTP address is associated with it. So it would not prevent the creation of another account using an SMTP address of the accoount that was deleted.

Eventually the Exchange services would automatically purge the disconnected account (30 days is the default as I recall...)

--
Cliff Galiher
"Charlie Russel - MVP" <b5d4c4ac-0eec-48db-9820-5da7759c7ccc@communitybridge.example.net> wrote in message news:0685df28-950f-43dd-9ee0-81fbf82165c7@communitybridge.codeplex.com...
If I remember correctly, you need to delete the account from within the Exchange Management Console. By doing it there, it cleans up both the AD and the Exchange Organization. The problem with doing it via Active Directory Users and Computers is that it doesn't clean up Exchange. (This, by the way, is the opposite of how we're used to doing things in the SBS 2003 days if for some reason we used native tools instead of the SBS tools.)



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Charlie. http://msmvps.com/blogs/russel

Thanks guys we will try deleting from Exchange Console and get back to you.

This client is on annual leave until Thursday... I will get back to you soon as he's back.  Sorry for the delay.

Hey Clint - any update on this?  I was one of the guys that posted this back in April (that you referenced in this thread).  I would hope Microsoft has a resolution or at least a reasonable suggestion on this by now...  we have 40 users at one site where this is a real concern - obviously deleting and recreating 40 users and all the related permissions is not an approach that makes sense for this.  Can you please provide an update on this topic.

Also, as an FYI, I've searched extensively on this through google, bing, newsgroups, the standard other tech support sites and there are numerous people trying to find a resolution to this, but not a single solution on any of the pages that I've seen.

Thanks,

Chris

Hi Clint - I'm the guy that originally posted this in another forum (the one you referenced in your original post).  I believe I've found a solution to this - at least where it relates to my particular case.  While the resolution makes little sense to me, it does work so hopefully it will be useful to you and others reading this later.

Background: I have a client experiencing similar issues - we were getting "Invalid e-mail alias" when editing certain user accounts within the SBS 2008 console.  This error would come up when making ANY change to the user within the console (regardless of whether it was related to emails, aliases, or Exchange).  What confused me initially was that many of the users I was trying to change were affected by this issue.  Then, due to lack of response from MS, and an increasingly frustrated client, I dug hard into this to compare the users.

For our situation, deleting and recreating multiple User accounts or Exchange accounts was not really an option and would quite likely create another swarm of support calls and world of headaches.  So I took another approach.

I found that the only users having the issue happened to use blackberry devices and had contacts setup for their Blackberry alias to forward mail to.  However, it was not affecting all Blackberry users - so what gives?  The answer, the email address of the blackberry contact record.  If the email address (EXCLUDING domain) was the same as the user's Exchange alias it was creating conflicts.  So if Joe User's Exchange alias is JUser@MyCo.com and he had a Blackberry contact setup at JUser@Blackberry.net this was causing a conflict.  Why?  I have no freaking idea since a duplicate alias should not register (IMHO) if the domain itself is different.  In this case, not only is the domain different but the "conflicting" address is an external contact!

So I dug further...  The contact had been setup in the same OU as the User (this had been migrated from SBS2003 which I believe had defaulted the creation of new Contacts to the same OU).  The OU in this case was MyDomain\MyBusiness\Users\SBSUsers.

Here's options to fix it (assuming, of course, you have the same scenario):

• User a different email address for the contact (obviously easier said than done).
• Remove any forwards or other dependancies that you had to it within Exchange.  Delete the Contact from the current OU.  Recreate it in a new OU (recommend a new OU especially for Contacts).  Note that simply moving the Contact from the old OU to the new OU doesn't seem to work (maybe it would with a full restart, but I wasn't in the position to be constantly restarting the server to play around with a new idea).

Note that disabling the old Contact, nor disabling the Exchange forwarding rule to the Contact, nor moving the Contact to the new OU worked for me.  It only worked by deleting and recreating a new Contact in another OU.

<sarcasm>I'd like to thank Microsoft for their prompt reply to this and other forums including Microsoft Connect</sarcasm>

Seriously though - can someone at Microsoft please make note of this and list it as a potential bug for review?

EDIT - it looks like the success was temporary.  While this worked and I was able to edit the initial users I modified in the above manner, when I went to make changes to the additional users at a later time I first did a check on the users I had already updated - FAIL.  So the change I made worked, but only for a while.  This may have something to do with the 24-hour refresh cycle of the SBS console that was mentioned in one of the posts above.  So, to refresh, I am able to reproduce this issue (just create a Contact with an email name that matches the Exchange email name), but am currently only able to work around the "Invalid E-mail Address" warning with temporary measures (such as temporarily renaming the external Contact's SMTP address).  I again look to Microsoft for answers on this - now that I seem to be able to reproduce the error, can you look into this and provide a solution?

Cheers,

Chris

• Edited by GeneTekA Tuesday, July 27, 2010 4:37 PM The initial solution recommended worked only temporarily.
• Proposed as answer by Winrescue_jordo Sunday, October 17, 2010 3:35 AM

Chris,

Would like to express my thanks on your hard work to solve this. Though not really solved it does give us some room to resolve the immediate issues and keep the clients happy.

I'g glad it's not RIM's fault though, I have people yapping at me about how much they hate the way blackberries operate, this would just fuel the fire!

Quite embarrassing though that something so simple is causing so much grief, come on Microsoft, sort it out! :)

 

Cheers

Ian

 

I think the other Chris is on to something. I was experincing the same thing for one user during a SBS 2003 -> 2008 migration. The owner, of course. The user did have a Blackberry at one time, but now uses an iPhone. So I intially thought it was something to do with Blackberry. My hunch was the prompt you get when you remove a user from the BES server - you are asked if you would like to remove Exchange attributes or something like that. That turned into a white whale. Installing Exchange SP3 and Rollup 1 also didn't fix it. What I did find was another mailbox that was setup to receive mail from an old domain (that was migrated to the new server during the migration), that had the same alias, but a different domain (for instance BobM@contoso.com, and BobM@wingtiptoys.com). Once we removed the addresses on the old mailbox that had the same alias part of the email address, I was able to assign PCs, and assign the default RWW computer to the user in SBS 2008 without error. I hope this helps some.

Reminds me of the old, old days when Ambiguous Name Resolution was a problem in Exchange.

Chris (not the same Chris as above <G>)

For anyone stumbling upon this question and still looking for an answer. Looks like this was fixed in SBS 2008 Update Rollup 5:

 

http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2011/01/26/sbs-2008-update-rollup-5-released-kb2458094.aspx

 

Regards,

Philipp

• Proposed as answer by Genesis Tech Thursday, March 15, 2012 6:26 PM

Philipp - thanks so much for sharing.  I hadn't come across the link you sent (even when doing a search to see if there was any update on this topic a few months ago).

Cheers,

Chris

Go into Exchange Management and click on Mail Contact under Recipient Configuration.  Click the Alias column and look for any Aliaes that have the same Alias on the User you are trying to edit.  Delete any that you find but took notes so you can add them back in.  Next click on the Primary SMTP column and look for any SMTP addresses that have the same SMTP address excluding the domain as the user you are trying to modify.  Once again take notes before deleting so you can add that contact back in after modifying the user.  For Example, we had a user with the email address michelle@ourdomain.com and Mail Contact with SMTP address of michelle@differentdomain.com We could not edit any of the properties of the user Michelle in the SBS Console.  After deleting the Mail Contact michelle@differentdomain.com we could make changes to the user Michelle.  After the changes were made, we added back the Mail Contact michelle@differentdomain.com

• Proposed as answer by Mark A. Hatfield MCSE - Hatfield Engineering Thursday, March 15, 2012 6:29 PM

Mark - the work-around you have suggested does work.  However, I'd recommend upgrading to the SBS 2008 update rollup 5 as suggested above as this will resolve this issue in a more permanent way.

Ok so you all have experienced this problem in SBS 2008 and it seems consistently connected to Migrating from sbs2003 when you have two users of say chris@domain1.com and chris@domain2.com .  Update rollup 5 is apparently a solution in 2008, I am now experiencing the same issue in SBS 2011 after migratign from SBS 2003.  More interestingly if I go into the EMC - Recipient COnfiguration - Mailbox and look through the "alias" column there are zero (as in not a single one, nada, 0, zip, nil, zilch) duplicates. 

Any help would be gratefully appreciated.

Chris

When I had this issue it was conflicting between a domain address and a Contact address.  In this case you wouldn't see the duplicate within the same user's account, but rather under a completely separate Contact account (which we had done previously when we had BlackBerry users setup with Contact addresses for BlackBerry mail forwarding before implementing a BES server).  Is your problem similar to this or are you servicing mail for 2 (or more) domains?  Have you checked the event logs to see if any additional info is returned there?

Chris

  

I am servicing 2 email domains and see nothing in the logs at this point that I find useful.  I will continue to do more digging.  I have also started a new thread since it is a different OS with same error:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/smallbusinessserver/thread/b42cf117-0585-446a-8cb6-35c89b0a33a6

Chris

That sounds like it may be a different issue.  I would start with closely reviewing the recipient address policies.  Is it happening on select users or all users?

Chris

I had the same issue and I was not able to find updates .

I went to Recipient configuration >>Mail contacts >> deleted the conflicting email Address

then tried to re-create the mailbox and it worked for me.

 Cheers

• Edited by Shaazk4 24 minutes ago