E-mail users with 2 e-mail addresses

[Labone]

Hello,
This is quite a complicated problem and I hope I can explain it correctly. We may not even be able to achieve this but I will ask anyway.....
We have 2 sister companies, Company A and Company B. They are both in the UK, but on different sites. Up until yesterday all e-mail was delivered to an Exchange 2000 server sited at Company A. All recipients in both companies had their mailboxes on this server, and the users at Company B got their e-mails by way of a VPN connection between the sites, delivered to Outlook PST files. All addresses were 'jbloggs@companyA.com' regardless of physical company.
Yesterday we installed a second Exchange 2000 server at Company B's site as they wanted to be more independent with their IT and wanted to change their e-mail address to '*@CompanyB.com.
We created a fictitious e-mail account call 'John Doe' on the new Company B exchange server to test connectivity before we migrated all the Company B mailboxes onto the new server.
John Doe had 2 email addresses, the primary was 'jdoe@CompanyB.com' and the secondary was 'jdoe@CompanyA.com' so we could overlap for a while and they could still receive e-mails to their companyA address whilst their contacts made the transition to the company B address. The idea was that any e-mail sent from Company A to Company B directly would travel across the Routing group connector we had created between the 2 sites, using the recipient's Company A address, but this doesn't seem to be happening. Because the Company B recipients have 2 e-mail addresses, any mail sent from Company A to Company B gets routed out to the ISP and their servers don't know where to route it because it has 2 e-mail addresses. It then returns an NDR as follows:
A configuration error in the e-mail system caused the message to bounce between two servers or to be forwarded between two recipients. Contact your administrator. <#4.4.6>
So we have resorted to using one e-mail address for Company B, which is CompanyB.com, and all e-mail gets routed outside.
This is OK but we have lost that 'crossover' period we were looking for, because one day they are jdoe@CompanyA.com, the next they are jdoe@CompanyB.com.
Does anyone have any ideas how we can achieve the crossover period, and also to route e-mails between the 2 sites without going out to the ISP?
Does anyone even understand what we're trying to do given my rambling explanation!
Any help would be appreciated.

 

[wdoellefeld]

Are you saying that email sent to someone with both a companyA and companyB address doesn't get routed internally when sending internally?

Did you remember to configure Exchange to accept mail for both companyA & B?

FRCP

http://www.frcp.net

 

[Labone]

Hi wdoellefeld
Yes, your statement is correct. E-mail sent internally from Company A to Company B recipients is routed externally.
This happens whether they have only address B, or both addresses.

How do I configure Exchange to accept mail for both companies?
I think we may be on to something here.

Thanks for your help.

 

[Labone]

OK solved it.
Just in case anyone has the same problem here is what we did:

In the recipient Policy for Company B, made the address for Company A secondary and unchecked the box 'This Exchange Organization is responsible for all mail delivery to this address' making it non-authoratitive.

Now when we send an e-mail to recipientB@Company A or Company B it uses the connector within the Routing group in Exchange to route it to the server on Company B site.
I think the other problem we were having was that we were making changes to AD or Exchange on the Company B server and expecting the effect to take place immediately on Server A. We didn't take replication times into account.

Thanks for your post, wdoellefeld. It pointed me in the right direction.