Remove Mail Contacts and MailUsers from Exchange Global Address List

Have a look at this..

Look at the following page - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607299.aspx

This does look like some pretty "gnarly" scripting dude!!  LOL!!

Have fun!

Kent

I appreciate your reply kdyer, but I'm not sure what 'New-MailboxExportRequest' has to do with my request.

think you are talking about Default GAL which contains all recipients in Exchange server.

So if you will see the Recipient Filter of this GAL using following command in EMS:

Get-GlobalAddressList "Default Global Address List" |FL *Filter

you will see a filter like:
{(Alias -ne $null -and (ObjectClass -eq 'user' -or ObjectClass -eq 'contact' -or ObjectClass -eq 'msExchSystemMailbox' -or ObjectClass -eq 'msExchDynamicDistributionList' -or ObjectClass -eq 'group' -or ObjectClass -eq 'publicFolder'))}

You can see it by default contains the Contacts too bcoz of the condition or ObjectClass -eq 'contact' .

So if you want that your default GAL exclude these contacts object then you will have to reset the Recipient Filter of your GAL like this:

Set-GlobalAddressList "Default Global Address List" -RecipientFilter {(Alias -ne $null -and (ObjectClass -eq 'user' -or ObjectClass -eq 'msExchSystemMailbox' -or ObjectClass -eq 'msExchDynamicDistributionList' -or ObjectClass -eq 'group' -or ObjectClass -eq 'publicFolder'))}

and then will have to create some other GAL for the contacts like this:

New-GlobalAddressList "Contacts Global Address List" -RecipientFilter {(Alias -ne $null -and ObjectClass -eq 'Contact')}

By default exchange contains an Address List with the name "All Contacts" for all contacts.

Also you will have to do some extra work to show a specific GAL to a set of users using user's Active Directory attribute "msExchQueryBaseDN".

Hope this is informative for you.

Thank you, ontech, but that's exactly what I did already. The articles above, which I listed in my first post, explain the same thing you suggested. I have done that, but the Default GAL still shows my contacts.

I also notice the AD Attribute:  "showinaddressbook" for each contact, it lists "Default Global Address List". If I remove that from the attribute, the contact won't be listed in the GAL any more. Does this setting overide the recipient filter on the GAL?  Is there a powershell script that can remove that item from the "showinaddressbook" attributes of _ALL_ the contacts at once?

I really appreciate your help.

I have created a brand new Global Address List called "Company Directory", using the recipient filter I wanted, which does _not_ include contacts or "mailusers". I used powershell to perform:

Get-Recipient -filter "AddressListMembership -eq '$((Get-GlobalAddressList "Company Directory").DistinguishedName)'"

Select allOpen in new window

...and it displays exactly what I want: no contacts or mailusers. It's been 36 hours and both Outlook and OWA _still_ show the contents of the original Default Global Address List. I checked, and the new "Company Directory" is set to $true for "IsDefaultGlobalAddressList". If I take one test contact and remove the "Default Global Address List" from his "showinaddressbook" attribute, he dissappears from the GAL which seems to prove that the old Default GAL is still being used even though it shouldn't be.

Anyone with any other ideas?

No one gave me any tips, just repeated what I already did.