Finding a User's Mailbox

When the voice mail user has dialed in, provided numeric identification to the voice mail application, and requested to hear messages, the application must find the mailbox associated with that number. Microsoft Exchange Server provides many directory attributes for search criteria, any of which can be used by the application to perform ambiguous name resolution (ANR).

One way the voice mail application can quickly find the mailbox associated with the numeric identification is by using proxy addresses. Proxy addresses are e-mail addresses by which the mailbox is known to the outside world. They have the form AddressType:Address. Because proxy addresses are indexed, mailbox lookups are very fast. For the best performance, the voice mail application can create a custom proxy address for every voice mail user with a format such as VOX:123456, where VOX is the AddressType for this application, and 123456 is the voice mail user's access number. When the user typs in 123456, the voice mail application constructs a lookup address VOX:123456 and performs a proxy address search. This search returns the distinguished name of the desired mailbox, which can then be used to gain administrator access to the mailbox.

When the voice mail application has gained administrator access to the mailbox, the voice mail password is checked. For more information, see Directory Operations and Administrator Program Extensions.

For more information about creating DLLs to automatically generate proxy addresses, see the Gateway Programmer's Reference.