When customers first hear about being able to enable extra JET Blue or ESE Database performance counters via adding a "Squeaky Lobster" registry value, they often think it must be a joke or ask you to repeat it.  And invariable the question comes Read More

Seems like yesterday that Exchange 4.0 hit the market. In March of 1996 Exchange 4.0 was released. I thought I would give you a link for the geeks among you that have been along for the ride and for those that go even further back to ALL-IN-ONE, MailWorks, Read More

Not so long ago, we had this question as a blog subject suggestion, so here it is: Exchange implements many of its services through the remote procedure call (RPC) facilities provided by Windows.  RPC is not limited to any particular transport Read More

I’ve worked for Microsoft for about 8 years, all in the Exchange group, and I really enjoy it.  The people who work here are bright, self-motivated, and we have the resources we need to get our jobs done.  It feels great to ship world-class Read More

"The Exchange Web Client" was the first web email client produced by Microsoft.  It had an interesting green and black color scheme but it did most of the basic needs for doing messaging.  We didn't have enough time to add calendaring support Read More

One question we often get asked when talking to customers contemplating an Exchange upgrade or a switch from a competitor’s mail system is, "how many users per server can Exchange handle?" Nowadays, that’s an open question - it very much depends on what Read More

We’ve received several requests on the tools newsgroup for the history of the development of ExBPA, so here it is.  The concept for such a tool has been around for several years, and there have been a few prototypes created previously.  For Read More

The billg bit or the DoNicknameResolution bit is a setting in the Active Directory that controls how Outlook ambiguous name resolution (ANR) works.  Normally, when resolving a name in Outlook, a query is done against the AD using the string passed Read More

JC Hillerman wrote a comment in on my bio: I heard that Exchange was purchased by Microsoft, but it seems clear that you were working on new development. Maybe it was just the MTA that was purchased? I also heard that Exchange was initally written Read More

Here’s an interesting historical question - when we say Out of Office, why does it sometimes get shortened to ‘OOF’? Shouldn’t it be ‘OOO’? Inside Microsoft, ‘OOF’ means not just the message which says Read More

When Exchange 2000 was released one of the goals was to allow third-party developers to write custom applications that they could use to automate mailing, CDO for Exchange was build into Exchange 2000, and CDOSYS was distributed with Windows.  These Read More

This is part two of a three part series. See part one here. When we set out to design the Exchange 2000 NT ACLs, the biggest task we faced was to determine what the correct values for the NT access rights should be. We knew we had to Read More

It’s amazing how much can change in six years.  Test has always been an area of constant innovation, creative problem solving, and process improvement.  As a result of this continuous improvement we have dramatically changed our work Read More

As an Exchange Support Engineer, I dread the onset of any virus that will affect our customers.  However, given that my name is Melissa, this virus was particularly painful for me!  Imagine answering a support call during this outbreak “Thank Read More

ISSCAN is a utility I created several years ago, and it is unique in my Microsoft experience in that it was designed, written, tested and shipped in a span of about 24 hours.  Now, I’ve worked at small software firms in the past where releases Read More