Distribution groups have a variety of settings on them that allow administrators to control use and privileges. Administrators may choose to restrict who can send to a distribution list by altering the accept messages from senders or members property, enable moderation and bypass moderation rights, or reject messages from individual senders or members to a group.
When using the get-distributionGroup commandlet to interrogate these settings a list of recipients that have been granted the rights or privileges is returned.
PS C:\> Get-DistributionGroup zCloudonlySendAsSecurity9 | fl *accept*
AcceptMessagesOnlyFrom : {Tim McMichael}
AcceptMessagesOnlyFromDLMembers : {}
AcceptMessagesOnlyFromSendersOrMembers : {Tim McMichael}
The list of recipients that is returned shows the names of individual assigned those rights. These names are not fully recipient objects in that it does not identify the specific recipient assigned the rights. Using the get-Recipient command “Tim McMichael” demonstrates that two recipients are returned.
PS C:\> Get-Recipient “Tim McMichael”
Name RecipientType
—- ————-
Tim McMichael MailUser
8c6f3197-070d-4785-af94-8f091a1f510e MailUser
How do we determine which object has been assigned the rights if the output appears ambiguous? The name listed here is the actual name property of the recipient object. If more than one object is returned, we can simply filter on the exact name and determine the exact recipient object the rights are applied to.
PS C:\> Get-Recipient -Filter {name -eq “Tim McMichael”}
Name RecipientType
—- ————-
Tim McMichael MailUser
With the recent changes in the provisioning process this will become less ambiguous with time. The new provisioning logic defaults the name field to the external directory object ID associated with the recipient. The external directory object ID is unique and specific to that recipient. This is an example where external directory object ID is now present.
PS C:\> Get-DistributionGroup zCloudonlySendAsSecurity9 | fl *accept*
AcceptMessagesOnlyFrom : {8c6f3197-070d-4785-af94-8f091a1f510e, Tim McMichael}
AcceptMessagesOnlyFromDLMembers : {}
AcceptMessagesOnlyFromSendersOrMembers : {8c6f3197-070d-4785-af94-8f091a1f510e, Tim McMichael}
With the external directory object ID it becomes unnecessary to utilize a filter as the recipient return is guaranteed to be unique.
PS C:\> Get-Recipient 8c6f3197-070d-4785-af94-8f091a1f510e
Name RecipientType
—- ————-
8c6f3197-070d-4785-af94-8f091a1f510e MailUser
When using command that return multiple objects filterable properties will assist in identifying the correct recipient.
TIMMCMIC 