I have in a few smaller companies that the turn of the Automatically update e-mail addresses based on e-mail address policy. Most reasons are really bad reasons. I have heard that we want all email addresses in lowercase or that they think Microsoft shouldn’t translate the Swedish character Ö to OE. So there is a perfectly good solution to do this using the email address policy too.

Enter replacements

you can in the beginning of the row write what characters you want to be replaced. That you want all uppercase A should be lowercase. That you want a Ö to become a regular O. So how do we do this. Using the magic of %r<In><Out>. I have my default one I use, but I needed to update that one since I got a customer request that I thought was good for the future too. My default is now as follows:

%rAa%rBb%rCc%rDd%rEe%rFf%rGg%rHh%rIi%rJj%rKk%rLl%rMm%rNn%rOo%rPp%rQq%rRr%rSs%rTt%rUu%rVv%rWw%rZz%rYy%rZz%rÖo%röo%rÅa%råa%rÄa%räa%rӔa%ræa%rØo%røo%r/-%r\-%g.%[email protected]

This one will:

• lowercase all default 26 ASCII characters
• Replace all \ and / with -
• Make sure that the swedish characters Å,Ä and Ö are correct

Sources

• How to Modify an SMTP E-Mail Address by Using Recipient Policies

Even thought the documentation says you need to put the %rXY infront of both the %g and %s, in my knowledge this is not needed.