SomeGuy's questions

Just switched to Exchange Online, and ran into an issue. We have an application that lets an employee email a customer. With our previous mail provider, we would authenticate to the SMTP server using a generic mail account we used for various applications (ie [email protected]). It would let us set the "reply name" and "reply address" to the employee's name and address, which we know based on internal app authentication. However, Exchange Online does not seem to allow authenticating with one address and setting the "reply address" to another.

Is there any way to authenticate to smtp.office365.com via "support@example", but set the reply address to the employee's address, such as "[email protected]". We use this to segment our customers so they are assigned to certain employees, and every attempt to change anything is failing.

A performance tuning tool reported that a bunch of our servers are set to the "Balanced" power plan when they should be set to "High Performance". The tool gets the value from HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\User\PowerSchemes\ActivePowerScheme per the MSDN article https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa373177%28v=vs.85%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

Values:

Power Saver - a1841308-3541-4fab-bc81-f71556f20b4a
Balanced - 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e
High Performance - 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c

About half of our servers show the registry value for "High Performance", and the others show the value for "Balanced". However if I look at the screen to change the plan, "High Performance" is selected on every server as shown below. Has anyone run into this? Why doesn't the selected value match the registry value? All servers are virtualized on vSphere if it makes a difference.

We use Exchange Online for our mail hosting with Outlook 201x. We have a shared mail account used by many different servers to send alerts out.

Address: [email protected]
From Name: Server Alerts

On each server, the alerting application sends mail via SMTP and explicitly sets the "from name" as "Server Alerts [Server Name]". However, this new name does not show in Outlook on the mail in the contact information at the top. Instead, we see the original name of just "Server Alerts". If I look at the mail properties, I DO see "Server Alerts [Server Name]" in the headers, so it IS there.

The kicker is that if I send a test mail to a GMAIL account, or to external people using Outlook on their own domain, they see the "Server Alerts [Server Name] from name on the mail itself.

Why is my explicitly set "from name" getting overridden by the default on our Outlook only? Is there a setting in Outlook that needs to be changed? I can't imagine there is an Exchange Online setting for this account that is incorrect since other mail providers do pass through the explicit name.

I am on Windows 7 and trying to run perfmon against Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 servers. I am running into the same issue with all remote machines.

When creating a data collector set, I specify a domain account that is in the administrators group on the remote machines (and "Performance Log Users" and "Performance Monitor Users" to be safe). On the "Available Counters" screen, When I type in a remote computer name, PerfMon locks up for a good 2-3 minutes before I can add any counters. I can then save the collector set. However, when I save it, the go/stop buttons are disabled if I click the set in the left panel, and missing if I click the Data collector set itself in the right panel. See the screens below. I can run data collector sets against my local machine with no problem. I am opening perfmon with my local account in both scenarios. I also have Remote Registry Service started on each remote machine. What is going on?

I use sp_send_dbmail to e-mail to groups of users. There can be hundreds of addresses at a time, all of which I am including as BCCs on one mail. Some users at certain domains do not receive the e-mail, and it does not show up in their spam folders. I know that some mail systems block incoming e-mail that has many addresses in the BCC field because it looks like spam. I am assuming this is what is happening.

I believe the ideal solution is to send the e-mails to smaller groups, or to send e-mail individually to every user using the TO field. However, I can't seem to find any guidelines. What is a safe number of BCC addresses to have in a single e-mail without it getting rejected as spam?

As per standard procedure we've been using for years for previous versions of both Oracle and SQL Server, I have installed Oracle's latest ODAC package, which includes the Oracle OLE driver onto our new SQL Server 2008 R2 x64 nodes. I have done the recommended system reboot, but OraOLEDB.Oracle does not show in the Linked Servers\Providers node in SSMS. The only difference between this installation and previous SQL Server installations is that I am now using SQL Server x64 (on Windows 2008 R2). Should this make any difference?

Note that I am able to connect to Oracle servers using SQL*Plus from the SQL Server nodes directly. The only thing I am missing is that Provider. Anyone know what I am missing? There are many posts around the web, but there seems to be a lot of confusion and outdated links to Oracle's download page.

The ONLY thing I need to be able to do is create a linked server to Oracle, and run select queries against it. I don't need to do anything through Visual Studio.