Problems with Exchange server.

2006/02/15 16:24:00

I had some issues with my email at work, which I use evolution to access via IMAP. After some packet capture and some searching yahoo turned up the following from the fetchmail FAQ:

“The Microsoft pod-person who revealed this information to me admitted that he couldn’t find it anywhere in their public knowledge base.

Another specific problem we have seen with Exchange servers has as its symptom a response to LOGIN that says “NO Ambiguous Alias”. Grant Edwards writes:

This means that Exchange Server is too f*� stupid to figure out which mailbox belongs to you. Instead of actually keeping track of which inbox belongs to which user, it uses some half-witted, guess-o-matic heuristic to try to guess your mailbox name from your username.

In your case it doesn’t work because your username maps to more than one mailbox. For some people it doesn’t work because their username maps to zero mailboxes. This is yet another inept, lame, almost criminally negligent design decision from our friends in Redmond.

You’ve got several options:

But, the best option involves a tactical nuclear weapon (an old ASROC will do), pissing off a lot people who live downwind from Redmond, and your choice of any Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, or Solaris CD-ROM.”

Made me giggle anyway even if it did not really solve my problems.

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