Script for finding users who does not have specific aliases entry - not working

Question

I wrote the below script for finding users who does not have specific aliases entry in the exchange account, but it returns all user in the OU. can someone help. thank you

Get-Recipient –OrganizationalUnit "OU Name" | where {$_.emailaddresses -notlike '*@abc.com’} | select name,SamAccountName

Answer 1

The issue here is that the EmailAddresses property is a collection of all the aliases for the recipient. If you do Get-Help about_Comparison_Operators, you will seen that

When the input is a collection of values, the comparison operators return any matching values.

So your Where-Object call is returning the recipients that have at least 1 email alias that does not match the string you've specified. So the Where-Object syntax you've got will only filter out those recipients that only have 1 alias -- one that matches the string in your filter.

If your aliases follow a naming scheme/policy, you might want to work with the -NotContains operator instead. This would looks something like this:

Get-Recipient | ? {$_.EmailAddresses -notcontains "smtp:$($_.samaccountname)@abc.com"} | 
select samaccountname, emailaddresses | sort samaccountname

You would of course need to alter the string to match the expected alias you're looking to exclude.

EDIT: If you don't have a naming scheme, as you say, then the best I could come up with looks like this:

foreach ($recipient in (Get-Recipient)) {
    if ($recipient.EmailAddresses | ? {$_ -like "*abc.com"}) {
        #do nothing
    } else {
        $recipient
    }
}

Now, I'm sure there's a better way to do that, but that's the basic logic that should work for you.