When an external Exchange user (i.e. a person working at a different company where said company uses Exchange) creates and sends a meeting requestto oneof our users, theproposed time of the meeting automatically appears on the invited user's calendar on our Exchange system. I realize thatin many cases this behavior is a handy"feature", but we havebeen asked if there is a way to prevent this for one or more users. Is there any way control this behavior? My own attempts at solving or working around the problem include: 1.Using Set-MailboxCalendarSettings to set ProcessExternalMeetingMessages to "false". Per the description of the setting below, I'm surprised this didn't work - any thoughts as to why that would be would be welcome as well: Use the ProcessExternalMeetingMessages parameter to specify whether to process meeting requests originating outside the Exchangeorganization 2. Configure an Outlook rule to delete appointments from users who are not included in the Global Address List. While this option helps, unless I configure the rule to permanently delete the item, the proposed time still appears as "tentative" on the invited user's calendar. Thanks.

Hi, I would like to explain in earlier versions of Exchange, meeting message processing is performed by the Outlook Sniffer process. With Exchange Server 2007, all meeting message processing for a regular mailbox is done by an Exchange assistant called Calendar Assistant. After Calendar Assistant processing the meeting messages, it will mark the meeting message as processed. Then, the message will not be processed again by Outlook. Nevertheless, if you set the ProcessExternalMeetingMessages value to false, the meeting request is not marked as processed by Calendar Assistant. Therefore, the Outlook Sniffer process will process the meeting message and add meeting tentatively to your Calendar. In order to workaround the issue, I suggest you set the ProcessExternalMeetingMessages on the mailbox and then configure Outlook to not process meeting request automatically: 1. On the Tools menu click Options 2. Click E-mail Options and then Tracking Options 3. Clear the Process requests and responses on arrival. Note: Making this change in Outlook affects not only meeting invitations but also responses to e-mail messages with voting buttons or responses to meetings for which you are the organizer. Mike

Thanks Mike - that at least offered me an option to respond with! I'm not sure if this is the correct means for making this suggestion but it would be very useful if the Outlook team would add a "Process request and responses on arrival" item to the Rules wizard on the "Select actions(s)" screen of the Rules Wizard. If that option had been available, it would have very effectively addressed the problem - becauseI could haveconfigured a rule to detect calendar items and process themautomatically if the sender's address wasin the Global Address List. Thanks again. Lance