Display or Export the Members of Exchange Distribution Groups

Applies to: Exchange Server 2007

The members of Distribution Groups can be viewed and modified through the Outlook Address Book. However, Outlook doesn’t offer a way to export a list of all the members.

Administrators can run the following Exchange Management Shell commands to display/export the memberlist, sorted by DisplayName.

Single Distribution Group

  • Display Memberlist
    Get-DistributionGroupMember {Name of Group} | Sort -Property DisplayName | Select DisplayName, Alias, Department
  • Export Memberlist to TXT file
    Get-DistributionGroupMember {Name of Group} | Sort -Property DisplayName | Select DisplayName, Alias, Department > C:DGmemberlist.txt
  • Export Memberlist to CSV file
    Get-DistributionGroupMemberĀ {Name of Group} | Sort -Property DisplayName | Select DisplayName, Alias, Department | Export-CSV C:DGmemberlist.csv

All Distribution Groups in the Exchange Organization

  • Display Memberlist (create a script file called something like C:scriptsGet-DGmembers.ps1, paste below commands into it, and run the file in the Exchange Management Shell)
    get-distributiongroup | Sort -Property DisplayName | foreach {
    $name = $_.displayname
    $output = ‘Group Name: ‘ + $Name
    write-output $output
    Get-DistributionGroupMember $name | Sort -Property DisplayName | Select DisplayName, Alias, Department
    write-output “” “”
    }
  • Export Memberlist to TXT file (create a script file called something like C:scriptsExport-DGmembers.ps1, paste below commands into it, and run the file in the Exchange Management Shell)
    write-output “” > C:outputDGmembers.txt
    get-distributiongroup | Sort -Property DisplayName | foreach {
    $name = $_.displayname
    $output = ‘Group Name: ‘ + $Name
    write-output $output >> C:outputDGmembers.txt
    Get-DistributionGroupMember $name | Sort -Property DisplayName | Select DisplayName, Alias, Department >> C:outputDGmembers.txt
    write-output “” “” >> C:outputDGmembers.txt
    }
  1. You are a life saver. I don’t care that this entry was from April 2009, you saved me a ton of work.

  2. Thank you very much.
    I’m a fan of lDIFDE and I used your instructions but swapped $name = $_.displayname for $DN = $_.DistinguishedName, as well as just selected the DistinguishedName for the Members part, and outputted to a .ldf file for easy manipulation in NotePad++ and then replaced the members attribute of the matching groups in the domain that I am migrating our customer to.

  3. Fantastic – needed this and it worked perfectly.
    Thankyou Wil

  4. thanks for the script. can the data be set for one line?

  5. Super nice… Thank you for sharing

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