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Can you really hide Distribution Group membership?

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Exchange Server 2003 offerred a way to hide Distribution Group membership from Exchange Tasks in ADUC. Exchange Server 2007 does not.

I’d written about this a little while ago in “HOW TO: Hide Distribution Group membership“. Recently a visitor left a comment on that post indicating how group membership can be hidden from OWA users as well. This more or less completes the procedure for hiding group membership from:
1) Outlook users (they cannot see members in Distribution Group’s properties in the Address Book, nor expand the membership when composing new messages)
2) OWA users
3) Delivery Reports: Messages sent to the Distribution Group with Delivery Reports requested do not return Delivery Reports for each member of the group.

As noted in the post, you can still look at a recipient’s Member Of tab in the Address Book and determine which Distribution Groups he/she is a member of. Not a convenient way of discovering membership, particularly in environments with a large number of users. Nevertheless, from a security standpoint Distribution Group membership isn’t truly hidden.

Comments

One Response to “Can you really hide Distribution Group membership?”

  1. Arnold on August 25th, 2008 1:04 am

    Excelent. Your thinks are really interesting. To have a good site you should not only to post something, but do it with your soul. You do your best.

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