Can not email local domain addresses...

[JPFSanders]

Hi all,

I have a very strange problem when trying to send emails to users in a local domain.

Let me explain, I have a customer which has a regular Win2003 domain, that domain is named ie: LOCALDOMAIN, they have an external DNS name for the external email.

Only a few users have external email addresses, so everybody has an email address in the form: "<username>@LOCALDOMAIN", and just a few of them have "<name.surname>@external.com".

In Exchange I have defined two SMTP directives:

@LOCALDOMAIN
@external.com

The LOCALDOMAIN one has been defined as the default one, and I have ticked the option to make this exchange orgranization responsible for any email address that uses this domain name.

The external.com is defined as not responsible for all the addresses that ends on this domain name.

The problem is that when any user tries to email another user using an internal address ie: user@LOCALDOMAIN outlook says that the address is not recognized and doesn't allow the users to send the email.

No internal address seems to work, not even the postmaster one.

I did spend like 4 hours checking the exchange server and all seems to be in order.

I have run short on ideas about what to check next,I will welcome any ideas on what to check...

Thanks beforehand

 

[MarkArnold]

Explain to us why you think you need two SMTP domains? WHat was the thinking behind whoever set this up for you.

In essence you only need one domain and that domain will be the one that is registered on the Internet (domain.com) rather than your local one (domain.local).

If you only want a certain subset of people to be able to send to and receive from the Internet then that's fine, we have an article we can point you at but the fact remains that the primary address remains the domain.com one for people.

So, elaborate a little on why the two domains are there and also why you're not authoritative for the other domain. We should be able to give you a different solution than your current state.

 

[JPFSanders]

Explain to us why you think you need two SMTP domains? What was the thinking behind whoever set this up for you.

The people using the setup have an old NT4 exchange 5.5 which they intend to phase out.

This exchange server is so unstable to send and receive email (bad infrastructure too) that some unscrupulous individual took advantage of, and sold them an outsourcing contract to do the email hosting and administration for them.

The contract is rubbish, this guy charges a fortune basically to have some pop3 accounts on an external server, then he's configured outlook to send and receive email through the external server. To my dismay they still use exchange 5.5 mapi as the mailbox storage.

This company is on a bit of a pickle, the outsourcing contract is really bad and they get charged per mailbox, so the poor guy that has to deal with all this crap though that as not everybody needs to send emails towards the internet people that do not need to send emails can have an internal address, and those who need to send and receive external email can have two addresses, the internal and the external.

His managers know about all of this because I carefully explained them what the solution is and that they can save a lot of money if they go back to host the email but this time on a Win2k3 domain plus exchange 2003.

(This goes against my opinion, I think they should use a free Linux server with IMAP, but this is a different story)

Once they have moved back to host the email themselves they still do not want to allow all the users to email to the outside, so the two email domain thing doesn't look like a too bad idea.

I know that the email can be restricted per authorized users using domain groups, but this is not the point.

The point is that you can have as many internal email domains as you like as long as the DNS and Exchange are configured properly.

In this case one domain is the AD domain name which is called i.e.: “DOMAIN.LOCAL” and the other the external internet DNS domain, “DOMAIN.COM”

I have not installed the exchange servers (there are two), they were on a poor state, I cleaned them up and they work pretty well except for the internal domain problem.

In essence you only need one domain and that domain will be the one that is registered on the Internet (domain.com) rather than your local one (domain.local).

Well, it is not what I want, I did not even wanted to have to use exchange.

If you only want a certain subset of people to be able to send to and receive from the Internet then that's fine, we have an article we can point you at but the fact remains that the primary address remains the domain.com one for people.

Article? gimme! gimme!

So, elaborate a little on why the two domains are there and also why you're not authoritative for the other domain. We should be able to give you a different solution than your current state.

I am authoritative for the local domain as it is the AD domain the exchange server belongs to. I'm not authoritative for the external domain because at the moment the MX records are pointing to the hosted mail server.

The situation regarding the hosted email is not going to change anytime soon unless I can prove that the exchange infrastructure is stable. Meanwhile I'm retrieving the external email via GFI's pop3 connector…

I can build a reliable email server, being either with Windows or Linux, but I'm not by any means an email expert. If you know a better solution for this issue, you are welcome to point me on the right path, and of course, I will be very grateful.

 

[MarkArnold]

Oohh, this is a long one. I'll try to tread through it but forgive me if I miss something.

So, GFI POP3 connector is good. This means you are probably pulling all the email from the hosted box and into Exchange. This further means that you can tell Exchange it is authoritative. Let me know if you have a number of other people collecting email direct from the POP3 box because if you are, I'm not sure how your GFI is working.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321721

is something you should read in that instance. If you are collecting all the email from the POP server you can simply remove the domain.local address space, leaving the .com there as Primary SMTP address.

Restricting people sending to and receiving from the Internet:

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/MF009.html

and

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/MF023.html.

The comical thing is that you might actually end up bringing the .local domain back for certain people But the difference is that you will have a set of users who will have only .com and others with only .local, never both!