EXCHANGE - Risks of sending mail to a distribution lists

[warmpapi]

Can anyone tell me what the risks are by creating a distribution lists on my exchange organization that has an external mail address? For example, I want to create a distribution lists that will contain people from our marketing department and people from our engineering department and possibly vendors. So if the external mail address to the distribution lists is
{distlists@mail.domain.com}

WHAT ARE MY RISKS? I THINK there may be an issue with mail looping correct? This may cause the MTA service to stop or my mail connector or bridges to go down? Can Anyone help me with this one?

THANKS

 

[kcassidy]

I don't see looping as an issue.

The email will come to the server addressed to the dist list. The Internet Mail Connector (IMC) will receive the message and hand it off to the MTA. The MTA will process the list, just as it would any other. It would determine the internal addresses and deliver them locally. Then,
It will pass only the outside addressed messages back to the IMC in the form of a new message.

Many firms that I deal with have both internal and external recipients. In Windows/Exchange 2000, there is a object type in the active directory specifically for managing them.

One Helpful Hint: In either Win/Exch2000 or Exch 5.5 its best to create a new recipients container and store all the externals in there. They can still be part of the list, are easily segregated for maintenance operations, etc. OR you could take it all the way and create external containers for each external company and store the contacts in there.