Active Directory, 3rd Edition

Mail-Enabling a Group (Distribution List)

A mail-enabled group is a group that is used as an Exchange Distribution List. You send email to the group's email address, and all users and contacts in the group that are known to Exchange (either mail- or mailbox-enabled) will receive a copy of the message:

    ' This code mail enables a group.
    Option Explicit
    Dim strGroupDN, objGroup
    ' ------ SCRIPT CONFIGURATION ------
    strGroupDN = "<GroupDN>"   ' e.g. cn=MyDL,ou=Groups,dc=mycorp,dc=com
    ' ------ END CONFIGURATION ---------
    Set objGroup = GetObject("LDAP://" & strGroupDN)
    objGroup.MailEnable
    objGroup.SetInfo(  )
    WScript.Echo "Successfully mail-enabled group."

Tip

Mail-enabling a group requires Exchange Data Administrator permissions.

You probably noticed that the email address wasn't specified when the MailEnable method was called. The email address is automatically created based on the sAMAccountName of the group. Unfortunately, CDOEXM does not allow you to specify the address for the group. It is possible to modify the email address programmatically, but you will need to modify the multi-valued attribute called proxyAddresses directly. This attribute controls the addresses available for a given mail object within the Exchange system.

Tip

The proxyAddresses attribute is a collection of addresses for a given mail object. Each value is of the form prefix:address—e.g., SMTP:[e-mail]. The two prefixes you will always find are smtp and x400, which specify addresses for those mandatory protocols. ...