Active Directory Dist group

Calling all Active Directory and Mail geek chiefs....

Ok, here's the problem. I have an active directory structure with thousands of entries. Computers, groups etc the whole ball of wax.

In there ... somewhere .... is a distribution group that has an email address and I need to add people to that distribution list. Here's the kicker. I do not know what the name of the distribution list is. I do, however, have the email address that is associated with the group and I can make a new test user and assign that same email address to verify it exists and I get the expected "that address already exists" bla bla..

So I know the email address, but no clue where the distribution list is or even how to find it.

Using the search feature in active directory users and computers doesn't really work as I fear that it is an address that is tacked onto a different distribution list that is not named anything remotely like what the email address is called (I have seearched using all sorts of similar names)


It looks like the ability to search by group email address from within the Active Directory users and computers snapin does not exist!!! (You can search for a user or a contact by email address but there is no such function for a group)

This should work:

1. Go to ADUC and right-click "Saved Queries" and do "New" > "Query".

2. Name it. Description is optional

3. The query root should be the entire domain (default). Leave "Include subcontainers" checked.

4. Click "Define Query..."

5. For "Find", choose "Custome Search"

6. Click on the "Advanced" tab.

7. In the "Enter LDAP query:" text area, enter:

(mail=emailaddress@distributiongroup)

Where emailaddress@distributiongroup is the obvious

8. Click "OK" twice to save the query.

9. Click on your saved query and do an "F5" and it should bring up your distribution group container.

I did a test on this at work and it worked for me, so hopefully that's all it should take for yours.

Bah, sorry Jon, should have clarified it was Windows 2000 server =(

I was able to find it, although I found out an interesting little quirk.

It was not a distribution group, but it was a random email address attached to a regular user as a secondary email address. Even though I went into a search and picked user then email it still would not come up.. Not sure if it only lists the primary email address or not.

This AD is so screwed up I am looking forward to gutting the whole thing soon and migrating to a new clean one.


Thanks for the help!

Don't feel bad. I just walked into an old NT domain that I took through a migration in April. Nearly every group that was created was done so in triplet (one for each of the previous 3 system admins). Most all resources still have Everyone Full Control permissions because of the security group mess it was in. I've been here for nearly a year now and have still not gotten it all straight.

Good you found your gremlin though

Yeah, that's pretty much the case here. They were a pretty big company in the first place with offices all over the world and then got bought up by an even bigger company.

There's about 8-9 domains for QA /R&D etc and they are all in various stages of disrepair and are essentially all slowly dieing off one by one. It's a scramble tying to migrate roles off onto "known good" servers before the old original servers die taking vital roles with them.

Like the first Exchange server of the forest that refuses to talk to any of the rest of the domain and refuses to listen to the other servers when they tell it that they are handling things now and to just sit back and relax =(

*pulls hair out*

and i thought the domain at my job was bad


our pdc bridge (a gx270) from NT > 2003 has a bad hard drive (sectors are bad) and its our only means of domain communication from our nt domain thats barely holding on with a tight thread. when that thing goes down, our email gets cut off due to our real pdc being on NT it sucks haha.


we wanted to replace all 4 of our NT boxes that are left, but alas, we got anal raped on our budget for IP phones, and the nessicary upgrades we wanted so we dont have to rely on our old nt boxes (put them to sleep!)