Sending e-mail via internet to internal users

[bpinter]

Hi Everyone,

I've got an issue with two exchange sites in one administrative group. I have one exchange server in the US and one in Australia. There is a US domain usdomain.com and an Australian domain, australiadomain.com. Originally the two sites were two separate companies(usdomain.local and australiadomain.local) which were then merged into one single AD domain australiadomain.local.

Once the two exchange servers were places into the one Exchange organisation the australian server went down and due to AD issues has not been able to be brought online again. The e-mails for the Australian office have been outsourced to an external provider. Now e-mails from the US office to the Australian office hang in the queue because they cannot be delivered to the Australian (offline server.) I am trying to set up a way to send e-mail from the US office to australiadomain.com e-mail addresses and go to the external provider.

At first, there was a routing group set up between the two exchange sites (connected via VPN) and the messages were just sitting in the US-AUS routing group queue. We deleted the routing group, but then the messages were sitting in the "Messages with an unreachable destination" queue.

Out of desperation, I created an SMTP routing group and put both servers into it. Then there was a queue called mailserver.australiadomain.local in the queue list, but it was in a Retry state with the error "unable to contact the server" or something similar.

I then tried to cheat by changing the DNS record of mailserver.australiadomain.local to point to the ISP's mail server and this seemed to almost work, but it's always retrying with "connection dropped by remote host"

Is there in fact a way of routing messages to 'internal' recipients via the internet? Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,
B.

 

[nsantin]

Check you recipient polices and remove australiadomain.com.

 

[bpinter]

Thanks nsantin. I did that already and it didn't seem to have made a difference. Let me explain that we actually had two separate policies, one for each domain. Deleting the one for australiadomain.com didn't update the users in AD. I know you can click "Apply now" but not on a deleted policy. Any idea how you can "Apply now" when you delete a complete policy?

For the moment we managed to get around it by mail-disabling the user accounts in the australiadomain.local domain. This is probably not the ideal solution, but it's working for us for now. Thanks for your help.

 

[markdmac]

If you want to remove the Australia SMTP addresses for users you can do so with vbscript.

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark

Check out my scripting solutions at

http://www.thespidersparlor.com/vbscript