Report-RecipientCounts - And Newborn Kittens

Yesterday some lady sent me an email -- at work -- and she needed to know if I wanted some of her newborn kittens. At first, I'm like: "Duh! As if!"

I don't know this woman, or care too. I just shrugged it off.

Then I heard my fellow admins cringe or moan one after the other the same email. Then someone piped up, "How many people did this go to?"

Crap! I should have seen this coming and just as I'm finishing up my trace message commands, into my cube walks one of the "Powers-That-Be" wanna bes.

"How can this happen? I though we had this locked down so no one could send a message to everyone in the company!" Crap! She sent it to everyone? No wonder my command was taking longer than I had expected. When my report came back, she had sent it 3 times, not just once. The first 2 times she tried some groups and found out she did have the permissions needed to send to the larger groups.

But new born kittens are important and the news must get out! She pulled up the address book, clicked the 1st person, then <ctl><a> and had everyone selected and put them on the To line.

This really happened. (Well, not exactly like this but very close.)

Protection from the Kitten Email Flood

You protect yourself with Default Recipient count maximums:
(Get-TransportConfig).MaxRecipientEnvelopeLimit - We had ours set to 4000.

In the Olden Days (Exchange 2003) the way recipients were counted is different than today in Exchange 2010. Back in 2003, the groups were all expanded before there was a count of users. But there were issues with doing the expansion before the count, I gather -- something about expanding too many groups and taking forever to finally deliver. I can't remember all of them. So the Microsoft Exchange Boys changed the way the count of users was made. Distribution Groups were now just counted as one. So if I sent a message to myself and a group containing 50 people, the recipient count would be 2.

Our 4000 setting was left over from those bygone days of 2003. 4000 was just fine for our world of 25,000 users. Many people sent to groups and those recipients ultimately numbered high in the 1000's but never as high as 4000. The setting was just ported over to 2007 and then to 2010. We didn't have any reason to take notice.
Until now.

So Make A Report Already!

So the burning question of the day went from "How did this happen?" to "Can we set the Max to 20 recipients?" -- well that's a bad thing too. People must work. In my book, you slap the hand of the person who did the bad deed and move on. I convienced the Power-Wanna-Be that we had to change the number, true, but we need to know what a good number is.

Then they asked "What is normally the highest number of recipients sent to each day? Each week?"
I had to say, "I do not know ... But I can find out."

So I wrote this script which keeps a running tab of recipient counts.
You can get it here.