Internal and ISP email help needed

[n2jesus]

Hi all,
I recently installed a exchange 2003 server in our office. It came with SBS2003, and I wanted to centrally locate the email, contacts, etc. We are using outlook 2003 with it. Our email is hosted on our ISP. We never deliberately use the internal email feature of exchange.

The problem is, outlook sets MS Exchange serve as the default email account by itself. I can change it to the ISP account, and within a couple of days, it's set back to exchange. I've learned to look for this, but the other people in the office just keep getting emails sent back as "undeliverable" by the exchange server.

Also, sometimes emails make it out of the building (somehow) with our local address on them. This makes it impossible for the recipient to reply.

Is there a way to set up exchange so that either the default account never changes, or so that no matter what account they use to send with, it goes out through the ISP?

Thanks for any suggestions,

Jim

 

[jpm121]

Sounds like you should have the Exchange SMTP connector set up so that it will forward outbound mail to your ISP's SMTP server if it's not local. Check your users in Exchange and make sure their SMTP e-mail address is set properly, should prevent the <internaldomain.local> type problem.

 

[MoaTad]

I have also had this problem with the Outlook clients for some time. Our users often address emails to both internal and external addresses. As long as the mail is sent via the POP account, everybody gets it since our internal email addresses are the same as our external ones (ex. bob@mydomain.com).
When the default account gets changed to Exchange, of course the addresses outside our network do not get the mail. Worse yet, the sender gets no notification that the people outside the office didn't get it and because the people inside the office did, then they assume everyone did.

I like the SMTP connector idea. But how do you set it up to detect what is local mail and what is external? I'm wondering because in our system, our local user addresses "look" like public addresses.
(ex. bob@mydomain.com instead of bob@mydomain.local)

Could you provide a little more detail about how to set up the SMTP connector?