Hi,

We're having trouble getting our employees to BCC all distributions lists in our company.
Problem resides in everyone clicking 'Reply to All' to reply which, much sooner than later, always floods everyone's mailbox and creates a lot more traffic than necessary on our Exchange servers.

I tried setting up a rule in ECP using a collector mailbox as follows:

-If the message is sent to a specific DL
-And is received from inside the organisation
-Set audit severity level to 'High'
-and blind carbon copy (bcc) the message to that same specific DL
-and redirect the message to BCC (a mailbox we created)
-stop processing more rules

With these settings, it doesn't seem to work.
Mails keep coming in as being sent by myself instead of from BCC (as I suspect the proper rule should do).
Any ideas?

Hi Kosmicc,

"Redirect the message to these recipients" itself should do it.

Description:
Redirects the email message to one or more specified recipients. The message isn't delivered to the original recipients, and no notification is sent to the sender or the original recipients.

Try this:

Condition:

-If the message is sent to a specific DL
-And is received from inside the organisation

Action:

-Set audit severity level to 'High'
-and redirect the message to BCC (DL;a mailbox we created)
-stop processing more rules

If you have noticed "Add recipients to the Bcc box" is appending the DL again to the existing message, and doesn't remove the DL from the To: or CC: field

Adds one or more recipients as blind carbon copy (Bcc) recipients. The original recipients aren't notified about the new BCC recipient and they can't see the Bcc addresses.

However Redirect says The message isn't delivered to the original recipients, that would be the DL. But please note that any other original recipients will also be missed by this rule.

Alternately you can think up of setting up a Policy Tip for these DLs. That would notify users prior to sending email to it.

References:

Transport rule actions

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-in/library/aa998315(v=exchg.150).aspx

Hi,

Not sure what you meant by "being sent by myself instead of from BCC ". Please note you can't change the sender, only the recipients will be changed.

There is no point if you don't know who sent the email, it would be like spamming.

Hi Kosmicc,

"Redirect the message to these recipients" itself should do it.

Description:
Redirects the email message to one or more specified recipients. The message isn't delivered to the original recipients, and no notification is sent to the sender or the original recipients.

Try this:

Condition:

-If the message is sent to a specific DL
-And is received from inside the organisation

Action:

-Set audit severity level to 'High'
-and redirect the message to BCC (DL;a mailbox we created)
-stop processing more rules

But if I try that then all it does is redirect the message from the DL to my BCC inbox.
The BCC inbox is supposed to act as an intermediary, not as the final destination.

So it would have to be like this:

Inside the organization a mail is sent to the DL without using BCC field > intercepted and rerouted to BCC mailbox > sent back to the DL but this time by using BCC field.

What I meant with 'being sent by myself instead of from BCC' is that I am part of an ICT DL we set up (only the organisation's IT staff is in it). I use that for testing purposes in this case. That's why I said that when I sent out a test mail, it arrived as being sent by myself, instead of by the BCC mailbox. Because if the rule works and the BCC mailbox intercepts the message and sends it out again, wouldn't all mails arrive as being sent from the BCC mailbox, but with undisclosed recipients this time (bcc field) ?

So, hypothetically:

If "Kathy" send an e-mail to DL-Everyone but uses the 'To-field' instead of the BCC-field, it is very likely most of the employees in our company will use 'Reply All' instead of 'Reply', thereby flooding everyone's inboxes with replies they don't want, and effectively stressing the servers and mailbox storage as well.

My solution should be:

Kathy sends an incorrectly compiled e-mail to DL-Everyone > All DL-Everyone mails are intercepted and redirected to the BCC mailbox. > From there the BCC mailbox sends it out again (this time using the bcc-field to the DL-Everyone list it was meant for.

That way everyone still receives the e-mail, and everyone can still reply without bothering everyone else.
My only questions are:
1. How do I set this up?
2. Will this method make the final sender the BCC mailbox or Kathy? Kathy's signature will be in it because it was her mail originally, but if the mail arrives with everyone in the DL-Everyone list, will they see BCC as the sender or Kathy? Because if everyone replies ALL like they always do, it might end up in the BCC mailbox which shouldn't happen.

Basically I'm trying to look for a solution that will make sure no one can send to DL-lists any more without using BCC.

Hi kosmicc,

What you are planning will be messing up the users and they would be totally confused what is happening.

I would say educate the users, rather than enforcing something complex like this, which might give rise to other tracking and trobleshooting issue to the Exchange Admin itself at a later point in time.

Now back to your requriements\ questions

2.Will this method make the final sender the BCC mailbox or Kathy?

If you setup what you have mentioned, email will be from the BCCMailbox to the suprise of the senders.

i.e Person X sends email to DL-Everyone, the email comes with Signature of person X but from BCCmailbox. Same happens anyone else sends it. More over there would be no-one in the To;Cc: field as well. The Outlook conversation view filters will also not work properly here to sort the emails.

Do you actually want the sender to change and DL-Everyone is moved to BCC. Or only DL-Everyone is moved to BCC.

1. How do I set this up?

I don't recomend you do this. However you can maybe setup a Outlook forwarder that any email sent to this mailbox To: DL-Everyone1 gets forwarded or something to the DL-Everyone1 via BCC.

Back to my earlier solution:

Condition:

-If the message is sent to a specific DL
-And is received from inside the organisation

Action:

-Set audit severity level to 'High'
-and redirect the message to BCC (DL and the BCCMailbox incase you want a copy for Journalling reasons)
-stop processing more rules

Processing as follows:

Kathy sends an incorrectly compiled e-mail to DL-Everyone > All DL-Everyone mails are intercepted and redirected to DL-Everyone again but in BCC field this time.

Now thing is I or you, need to test it if it works or not.

Even better if you restrict the DL to accept messages from selective users only.

References:

Interception and Redirection of Messages Using Transport Rules or Journaling

Hi kosmicc,

My earlier post\suggestion seems difficult to be implemented.

I have tested  and the Redirect option doesn't seem to strip the Headers (To:,Cc:) but does add the redirected mailbox in Bcc. So will not work for your requirement.

I'll test some more and get back to you.

Hi kosmicc,

This one works.

-----------------------------------------------

RedirectRule

If the message...
Is sent to 'User1@bluebell.com'

Do the following...
Remove this header: 'To'
and Redirect the message to 'User1@bluebell.com'

Rule comments

Rule mode
Enforce

Additional properties
Sender address matches: Header-----------------------------------------------

Scenario1 (With only Redirect rule):

1. Satyajit sends email to User1
2. The redirect rule takes it and sends the email to User1
3. User1 receives the email in the mailbox can see Sender:Satyajit ; To:User1

Scenario2 (With Redirect  and RemoveHeader Rule):

1. Satyajit sends email to User1
2. The remove header rule removes 'To:User1'
3. and redirect rule sends the email to User1 (note redirects are always bcc'd)
4. User1 receives the email in the mailbox can see Sender, but there is no To: header itself

Screenshot below with top one with remove header, bottom email without it:

NOTE:- To remove additional header add multiple higher priority rules on top of this one without stop processing rules option. Redirect rule being the last one.

I've set it up like this now (the ICT group is just for testing) and it still doesn't seem to work. Any idea what went wrong?

Hi kosmicc,

Let me know, how did you test it. (also note if you have multiple DCs it might take awhile to take effect)

Please share the received email screenshot as I have put earlier. You can also add the senders sent Item email screenshot.

Also try with a user mailbox first to see if that works.