Require Sender Authentication

Recently it seems like distribution lists are not working as intended. Typically we set up mailboxes so anyone can send emails to distribution groups without being authenticated.  Unfortunately when sending emails from an outside address, they get a bounce back.

I know the typical solution would be to go into the Exchange Management Console, search for the distro group -> properties -> Mail Flow Settings -> Message Delivery Restrictions -> Properties -> Uncheck “Require that all senders are authenticated.”

Going a step further, I wanted to see what other distro groups had this so we can address them pro-actively.  I found an article which ultimately pointed me to:

Get-DistributionGroup | FT Name, RequireSenderAuthenticationEnabled

The issue was that we have 500+ groups and I didn’t want to sift through them or export them to an excel and filter the results.  I just wanted the output to be what I wanted… anything that RequiresSenderAuthenticationEnabled and is set to “True.”

So, I tried to create my own query and came up with:

Get-DistributionGroup | where {$_.RequireSenderAuthenticationEnabled -eq “true”} 

This allowed me to just output the ones where “true” is set (or the checkbox is checked).  This can also be used for the opposite, just change the “true” to “false” and you should get the opposite result.