By Tom Hundley on 8/26/2008 10:51 AM

Often times you'll want an external application server to be able to relay external email through your Exchange server.  For example, in my setup, my DNN servers hosted in my data center use the Exchange 2007 server on my local network as their SMTP server.

You obviously need to be careful about configuring your server to be an open relay.  Configuring this correctly with Exchange 2007 is easy.

Create a new Receive Connector Chose Custom as the intended use Specify your Local Network settings and FQND to respond to requests.  The default setting to use all available IPv4 addresses for the local IP addresses is normally fine. ***This is the most important Step***.  REMOVE the default entry of 0.0.0.0-255.255.255.255 in the Remote Network Settings.  Failure to do this will result in your server being an Open Relay and you'll quickly find yourself blacklisted, and that's a huge can of worms you do not want to deal with. Add the IP address(es) of your Remote Server. After...

Read More »

By Tom Hundley on 8/17/2008 11:17 PM

I had every intention of detailing my troubles getting Exchange 2007 setup with Server 2008 and ISA 2006.  I was so frustrated by the end of the process and so relieved when I finally got everything to work, I stopped thinking about it and forgot to post my experiences.

I wanted to log this one piece of information because it was the hardest thing to troubleshoot and I couldn't have done it without finding some needle in the haystack posts.

Problem: Once I finally got most of the functionality working, the last piece I was stuck on was getting Outlook Anywhere to connect to the Directory services.  The Mail connection would work fine, but not the Directory connections, so when would get a failure when connecting to things like Contacts, Tasks, etc.

Solution: It turns out that it was a bug in the TCP/IP 6 drivers on Server 2008.  If you disable TCP/IP 6, everything started worked perfectly.  It's possible that this has been fixed by now, and if not, one would imagine that it definitely would...

Read More »

By Tom Hundley on 8/17/2008 11:06 PM

Problem: Total Care Websites is hosting email for several companies and I needed to figure out how to create the same distro name for difference domains.

Easy Solution: The Display Name and Alias need to be unqiue, but the SMTP addresses don't have to be the same as the alias.  The default EAP does this so it's easy to think that the SMTP needs to be the alias... You can control this with the email address policies, but the bottom line is this:

If you need to have two distros:

sales@companyA.com sales@companyB.com  Simply create two Distribution groups called:

CompanyASales CompanyBSales Then modify the SMTP addresses and add sales@comanyA.com to the first and sales@companyB.com to the second.

Like I said, with some EAP tweaking you can create the policies to that you don't need to manually change the SMTP address.  You'll also want to create some Address Lists and Offline Address Books for each company as well so the users in each company don't see the other contacts......

Read More »

By Tom Hundley on 8/15/2008 9:42 AM

I have to give a shout out to David Sandor or showing me about the Local Continuous Replication (LCR) feature of Exchange 2007.  This is a huge load off my mind since I didn't yet have any backups in place for the new environment.  I've been meaning to install Microsoft Data Protection Management Server to use that for backups and disaster recovery (and I probably still will), but I simply haven't had time to get to it.  Backup Exec licenses are very expensive- not to mention the cost of tape drives and tapes. 

Local Continuous Replication give me a great and very inexpensive way to quickly get a modicum of disaster recovery implemented for my Exchange environment.  I simply point the Local Continuous Replication paths to my file server and Exchange will asynchronously replicate everything in the Storage database to the non-production volume.  So in a production drive failure, all I need to do is rebuild the server and restore the Local Continuous Replication database.

Local Continuous Replication...

Read More »