Final pass with Meera

Ready for publication.

Author: KCCross

Exchange/ExchangeServer/administration/certificate-assignment-fails-invalid-characters.md

@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 ---
-title: Certificate assignment fails with error 0xe434352
-description: This article resolves error 0xe434352 that occurs during certificate assignment if unsupported characters are used in the domain name of Receive Connectors.
-#customer intent: As an Exchange Server administrator, I want to resolve certificate binding issues that are caused by invalid fully-qualified domain names (FQDNs) so that I can maintain system reliability.
+title: Certificate assignment fails and returns error 0xe434352
+description: This article provides the resolution for error 0xe434352 that occurs during certificate assignment if unsupported characters are used in the domain name of Receive Connectors.
+#customer intent: As an Exchange Server administrator, I want to resolve SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) certificate binding issues that are caused by invalid fully-qualified domain names (FQDNs) so that I can maintain system reliability.
 author: cloud-writer
 ms.author: meerak
 manager: dcscontentpm
@@ -20,23 +20,23 @@ search.appverid: MET150
 ms.date: 01/28/2026
 ---
 
-# Error 0xe434352 and SMTP certificate assignment fails 
+# Error 0xe434352 and SMTP certificate assignment fails
 
 ## Summary
 
-When you assign certificates to Exchange services, you might encounter error 0xe0434352 during the certificate binding process. This error typically indicates that one or more Receive Connectors in your Microsoft Exchange Server environment use FQDNs that contain characters that aren't supported by DNS standards.
+When you assign certificates to Exchange services, you might encounter error 0xe0434352 during the certificate binding process. The error indicates that one or more Receive Connectors in Microsoft Exchange Server use FQDNs that contain characters not allowed by DNS standards.
 
 ## Symptoms
 
 You run the `Enable-ExchangeCertificate` cmdlet to assign a certificate to the SMTP service. The operation fails and returns the following error message:
 
 > The Exchange Certificate operation has failed with an exception on server <*Server Name*>.
-> 
+>
 > The error message is: Unknown error (0xe0434352)
 
 ## Cause
 
-This issue occurs if the FQDN of one or more Receive Connectors contains unsupported characters, such as underscores. The connector creation process allows unsupported characters, such as underscores, in the domain name. However, these characters violate DNS standards and cause failures during certificate binding.
+This issue occurs if the FQDN of one or more Receive Connectors contains unsupported characters. The connector creation process allows underscores in the domain name. However, underscores violate DNS standards and cause failures during certificate binding.
 
 For more information about domain names, see the following articles: