ds: how to setup mail forwarding without a contact object

hmmm, you say... never saw that before. neither had i. every reference i could locate about this topic directed me to setup a contact object to forward to. however, the talented messaging guys i work with came up with a different process. i thought i'd share it for the good of humanity. alright, so let's say you find yourself in a situation where someone leaves the company and wants [his/her] mail forwarded. here's the process you would take to make this work:

1. gather these fields. take down this information. step 2 will blow it away.
• mail
• mailNickname
• proxyAddresses primary)
2. disconnect [his/her] mailbox.
3. put these fields back in for the user object.
• mail
• mailNickname
• proxyAddresses (primary from step 1)
• proxyAddresses (secondary - the email address to forward to)
• targetAddress (the email address to forward to)

whenever an email comes in for [him/her], the email will forward to the new address. to elaborate a little on the above steps, the primary address has a capitalized "SMTP:" where as all secondaries has a lowercase "smtp:". if the user is Ima Seeyanya and their old address is ima.seeyanya@olddomain.com and their new address is ima_seeyanya@forwarding.com, the values would fill in as such:

• proxyAddresses: SMTP:ima.seeyanya@olddomain.com
• proxyAddresses: smtp:ima.seeyanya@forwarding.com
• targetAddress: SMTP:ima.seeyanya@forwarding.com

things to note: retaining mailNickname will let users continue to resolve the email address with this method. this method does not remove the user from any distribution lists [he/she] belongs to.