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Automatically add email signatures/disclaimers with Exchange 2010

Arjan Jorink — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 11:34:11 +0000

For many organizations, it’s a good idea to centrally manage email signatures and email disclaimers – it gives a consistent branding on your email communications, and you’re not relying on end users to set them up correctly and keep them consistent. If you’re running Microsoft Exchange 2010, you have the ability to do this out of the box, using ‘Transport Rules’. Applying signatures this way should also save you space in your mailbox databases, due to the fact that signatures won’t be added on to each message in every users “Sent Items” folder.

To get started with a basic signature, open the Exchange Management Console, and navigate to: ‘Organization Configuration’ >> ‘Hub Transport’, then select the ‘Transport Rules’ tab, finally click the ‘New Transport Rule’ link in the actions pane on the right. The Transport Rule wizard should then start, you’ll need to provide a name for your rule, and then select which user or group of users this rule should apply to. In your first instance, it’s probably a good idea just to apply it to yourself to test with, later you can apply the rule to other individuals, distribution groups etc. Have a look through the options available to you in step 1, they are quite flexible with who the rules can be applied to. In step two of the transport rule wizard, you will need to chose the ‘append disclaimer text’ action, and then enter your text by clicking the appropriate hyperlink in the bottom pane of the wizard.

Before we move on to step 3 of the wizard, you should be aware that signatures and disclaimers can only be appended to the absolute end of emails. If you want to have a signature at the end of each reply, you will need to look into 3^rd party solutions. Due to this fact, I always add an exclusion rule, for any email with ‘FW:’ or ‘RE:’ in the subject, in order to prevent a build up of signatures right at the end of an email conversation, which could confuse people. Once you’ve added this exclusion rule, the wizard will confirm your choices, and then create the transport rule. At this stage, if you send an email that matches the criteria in step 1 of the wizard, you should see your signature applied.

Dynamic email signatures

The best aspect of adding signatures via Exchange transport rules is the fact that certain attributes from Active Directory can be dynamically inserted into the signatures – just insert the attribute name into the disclaimer text in the transport rule, with ‘%%’ on either side of the attribute name (e.g. %phoneNumber%). Unfortunately not all AD attributes will work, but there are a number of useful ones available, the full list is provided on Microsoft TechNet.

For our next signature, go back and edit the previous transport rule you created, and edit the disclaimer text to include some dynamic attributes. We will also need to add some very basic HTML to format the signature:

Now when a mail matching our criteria is processed by Exchange, it should have our name added in bold, along with our phone number. You could get more creative with the HTML in the signature, inserting company logos, or creating tables.

Text only email signatures

If you’re sending a text only email (Many mobile devices will send these out – including iPhones and Blackberries), Exchange will have to convert your signature to a text only format. It’s always a good idea to check what the converted version looks like – especially if you’ve used a lot of HTML.

It’s also worth noting that a bug in pre SP1 meant that when Exchange converted HTML messages to text only, the signature ended up with and tags at the start of it. This issue was fixed in Exchange SP1.

Chaining email signatures

Finally, as you build your signature system up for your organization – it may help to be aware that you can create multiple transport rules that build up your signature and disclaimer in chunks. For example, one rule could include generic name and contact details, followed by another section with a departmental marketing line, followed by a global disclaimer message. By setting the priority of each transport rule, you can ensure that they will be joined together in the correct order.

Why should you use Diskpar (Diskpart in W2003 SP1)?

Arjan Jorink — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:41:01 +0000

Exchange Server can benefit from having basic disk partitions track-aligned. Diskpar.exe is used for aligning a partition at the storage level, which, if used to create the partition, can have a significant positive performance impact on the storage and is highly recommended. Before I go into the details of how to do this, I’ll give some basic definitions. A partition is the container you create on an initialized disk to format and then use. Multiple partitions can be created on a single physical disk, and each partition will function as a separate disk (even though the partition will appear to be a separate disk, the total throughput of the physical disk is unchanged – so if you make two partitions on each disk and use them equally, they will each effectively only have half the available i/o rate. This is important to keep in mind for capacity planning). A sector is the smallest accessible unit on a physical disk, with multiple sectors comprising a track. A partition that is track misaligned will occasionally cause 2 I/O operations instead of one depending on the actual drive geometry.

Even though some storage obfuscates sectors & tracks, using diskpar will still help by preventing misalignment in cache, or wasted cache. If the disk is not aligned, every Nth (usually 8th) read or write crosses a boundary, and the physical disk must perform two operations. At the beginning of all disks is a section reserved for the master boot record (MBR) consuming 63 sectors. This means that your partition will start on the 64th sector, misaligning the entire partition. Most vendors suggest a 64-sector starting offset, meaning that your partition starts on the 65th sector vs the standard 64th. Check with your particular vendor before standardizing this setting on a particular storage array. The key is to have it aligned on a 4 KB boundary from the start of the disk, of which choosing 64 sectors is 32 KB, and aligned. (64 * 512 bytes per sector = 32,768 bytes)

It is important to differentiate the sector alignment, with file level fragmentation and allocation unit size. Most Exchange Server I/O is random 4 KB read & write to the database .edb file. We don’t notice a huge statistical difference in normal file fragmentation on a database LUN. Since Exchange best practice is to place all database files in a storage group on the same LUN, as they grow, they will fragment each other pretty severely. I have only heard of one case where serious file-level fragmentation impacted Exchange, and that was when a customer ran a 3rd party application on the same partition as the database files, and it created/deleted millions of very small files in a day. If you dismount the databases, and perform an disk-level defrag, against each database LUN, you will eradicate the file level fragmentation. It is not recommended to have any other files on the exchange database or log partitions (it is especially important not to share the log partitions with other programs, since log access to the drive is sequential, and random access to the drives hosting the drive will significantly reduce the performance.)

Exchange accesses the database file (edb) in random 4 KB read/write, which is, by default, the allocation unit size on the partition. The default allocation unit size of 4 KB, which can be set at partition format, is the best practice. If you use the default allocation unit size of 4096 bytes and have a starting offset that is a multiple of 4096 bytes, then your partition will always align on a 4 KB boundary. Setting the allocation size to be larger than 4 KB will disable NTFS compression [Exchange log and database files should always be uncompressed], and is useful in rare streaming backup solutions of extremely large databases where a larger allocation unit size will increase backup speed.

Diskpar:

You have 2 switches, (i)nfo, and (s)et, and a parameter. The parameter which you must add is the disk number. This is discernable in disk manager (diskmgmt.msc)

1) First I query the disk and notice that the starting offset is 32256 bytes, which is not aligned.

C:\>diskpar -i 2

—- Drive 2 Geometry Infomation —-

Cylinders = 13056

TracksPerCylinder = 255

SectorsPerTrack = 63

BytesPerSector = 512

DiskSize = 107389255680 (Bytes) = 102414 (MB)

—- Drive Partition 0 Infomation —-

StatringOffset = 32256

PartitionLength = 107380998144

HiddenSectors = 63

PartitionNumber = 1

PartitionType = 7

2) Notice 32256 / 4096 = 7.875 , which is not an integer. We want to change this to improve performance.

3) Now I set it to 64 sectors, and select the full available partition size.

C:\>diskpar –s 2 (yes, it’s really this easy)

—- New Partition information —-

StatringOffset = 32768

PartitionLength = 107388862464

HiddenSectors = 64

PartitionNumber = 1

PartitionType = 7

4) Now we get 32768 / 4096 = 8. Yeah!

5) Now open up disk manager and format the drive.

Diskpart:

In Windows 2003 SP1, diskpart.exe has included diskpar.exe functionality. The main difference is that diskpar creates a partition in sectors (512byte), and diskpart uses kilobytes. In the example below we take a disk w/o any partitions and create it with the same starting offset of 32768 as the above diskpar.exe example.

C:\>diskpart

Microsoft DiskPart version 5.2.3790.1830

Copyright (C) 1999-2001 Microsoft Corporation.

On computer: Exchange2003

DISKPART> select disk 1

Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> create partition primary align=32

DiskPart succeeded in creating the specified partition.

Resources:

Microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/2000/server/reskit/en-us/Default.asp?url=/resources/documentation/Windows/2000/server/reskit/en-us/prork/pree_exa_oori.asp

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/2000/professional/reskit/en-us/part6/proch30.mspx

3rd Party:

http://h71019.www7.hp.com/ActiveAnswers/downloads/Exchange2003EVA5000PerformanceWhitePaper.doc

http://www.emc.com/pdf/techlib/exchange_2000_symmetrix.pdf

Source : http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2005/08/10/408950.aspx