Exchange 5.5 for Internal mail only 2

[ITschoolGuy]

Hi -

I have a client who just set up an NT 4.0 server running Exchange 5.5. Normally I'd have recommended that they use more up-to-date products but, they're a small company with only 5 employees and they already own licensed copies of the aforementioned software. They only want the Exchange server for inter-office e-mail and shared calendaring with MS Outlook. They have Windows XP SP2 w/ Outlook 2k3 on the clients.

The exchange server is a member of their W2k3 domain. It is running NT SP 6a and Exchange SP3. There is a single site with 5 recipient mailboxes...each set up to correspond to the user's primary NT account. The domain controller is running DNS services. The MS Outlook clients are each setup with a POP3 Internet mail account and the Exchange account for that particular user.

When users attempt to send inter-office mail to one another, the messages are bounced back. The contents of the Non-deliverable messages seem to indicate that an attempt was made to route them to the Internet rather than keeping them internal. What would cause this? Could it be some sort of DNS issue? I am not too familiar with Exchange but I need to try to get this solved. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks much!!

Chris

 

[Spirit]

If you want to share your calendar info you can't do that with POP3 confige them for SMTP and the problems will vanish and you'll get a lot more functionality.

Make sure the email address you are using (inc. domain) is resolved internally from the exchange server.

Iain

 

[ITschoolGuy]

Sorry to be a pest but I'm not really quite sure how to do that. I see that the domain controller has a DNS service setup with NS, SOA & HOST records. But I'm not exactly sure how to make the Exchange server resolve local e-mail addresses internally.

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

C-

 

[zbnet]

Running this as a new install on NT is just plain asking for trouble. Add to that the fact that it's only Exchange SP3 (it should be SP4 + post-SP4 hotfix rollup (which is the closest thing to an SP5 for Exchange 5.5)), and just to top it all off configure both Corporate and Internet services in the Outlook profiles, and no wonder there are problems.

I agree with Spirit: Exchange is a corporate email server that is designed to work with an SMTP mail feed - it sits uncomfortably in a POP3 environment. Removing the POP3 service will force Outlook to only have the Exchange Global Address List.

http://www.swinc.com/resources/exchange/smtp.asp

is an excellent place to start.

 

[ITschoolGuy]

Hi zbnet -

Thanks for replying. I wish I could just get this customer to move over to a newer version of Exchange (on a newer O/S) but they won't.

I think I understand what you're saying though...are you suggesting that I configure the Outlook clients to use only the Exchange Corporate e-mail? If that works, then I can assume it's the presence of the POP3 account that's messing things up? If that's the case, could it be due to something in Outlook 2003 that's different than Outlook 2000? The reason I ask is that this company used to have the exact same configuration except with Outlook 2000 on the workstations and it worked like a charm.

Anyway...thanks for your insight. I'll try what you suggest.

Regards,
Chris

 

[fuego007]

If POP3 was configured first in Outlook 2003, it will be the default protocol, meaning that messages will try to go to the POP3 server first. Go to Tools|E-mail Accounts in Outlook and click "Next" and make sure the Exchange server is listed as the default (note that above the window in states that messages will be processed in the order shown - if POP3 is at the top, this is where your problem lies).

When all else fails, READ THE DAMN BOOK!