Address Lists Described

An address list organizes recipients so that they can be easily found by users who want to contact them.

The most familiar address list is the global address list (GAL). By default, the GAL contains all recipients in an Exchange organization. In other words, any mailbox-enabled or mail-enabled object in an Active Directory forest where Exchange 2003 is installed is listed in the GAL. To look up the e-mail address or phone number of a recipient, the user can use the GAL to locate this information. The GAL is organized by name, instead of e-mail addresses, for ease of use.

Client applications, such as Outlook 2003, display the available address lists that Exchange provides. Users choose from the available address lists when they search for information. Several address lists, such as the GAL, are created by default. Address lists reside in Active Directory, so mobile users who disconnect from the network are also disconnected from these (server-side) address lists. However, offline address lists can be created for use in a disconnected environment. These offline lists can be downloaded to a user's hard disk drive. Frequently, to conserve resources, the offline lists are subsets of the information in the actual address lists that reside on your servers.

Address lists displayed in Outlook 2003

An Exchange organization can contain thousands of recipients. Compiling all your users, contacts, mail-enabled groups, and other recipients can cause many entries. As an administrator, you can create address lists to help users in your organization find what they are looking for more easily.

For example, consider a company that has two large divisions and one Exchange organization. One division, named Fourth Coffee, imports and sells coffee beans while the other, Contoso, Ltd, underwrites insurance policies. For most day-to-day activities, the workers in the coffee division have almost no relationship with those in the insurance division. To make it easier for people to find each other, you create two new address lists—one for Fourth Coffee and one for Contoso. Users can now choose to use the smaller address lists when looking up people in a certain division, or they can always use the GAL, if they are not sure which division a coworker is part of.

Address lists can be sorted by any attribute that is associated with a recipient. City, title, company, office building, or any other attribute that you can filter recipients with can be the basis for a new address list.

You can also create subcategories of address lists. For example, you can create an address list for everyone in Manchester and another for everyone in Stuttgart. You can then create an address list under Manchester for everyone who works in research and development. Because the research and development list is under the Manchester list, the research and development list contains only those recipients who are in research and development and in Manchester.

Address lists are created dynamically. When new users are added to your organization, they are automatically added to all the appropriate address lists. These updates are one of the primary responsibilities of both the Recipient Update Service and Exchange System Attendant.