Got Exchange 2007 and also an Exchange 2013 server (in the middle of migration). From what I understand, 2007 hands off to 2013 for all sending of email.

Recently, we had an issue where some emails to one domain were getting bounced but some users were getting through. It turned out that users with contacts were working but those without were being bounced. In the end, discovered that the remote domain was set up as an authoritative domain in Exchange 2007 which was causing the problem. Removed this and it all worked.

But, we don't know why it suddenly stopped working. Couple of points:-

1. Pretty sure the remote domain setting in exchange 2007 has been there for a while.

2. This used to work until about two week until I deleted the authorative domain.

My theory is that something has been changed on Exchange 2013 that makes this authoritative domain setting "relevant". I.e. It goes from not caring to restricting to contact only users.

So far no-one has admitted any changes on Exchange 2013 :-( (Its not just me who looks after). We're desperately trying to work out exactly what has happened here to prevent accidentally doing this again.

Any idea what change on 2013 would make this setting relevant?

This is expected behaviour. If Exchange is authoritative for a domain, then it assumes it knows about all of the recipients. Using contacts and a send connector is the only way for Exchange to know that an internal email address should be directed to an external mailbox.

An Internal Relay domain uses the send connector if an internal recipient is not found.

This behaviour should be the same for Exchange 2007/2010/2013. However, I don't have an Exchange 2007 test environment to verify.

This is expected behaviour. If Exchange is authoritative for a domain, then it assumes it knows about all of the recipients. Using contacts and a send connector is the only way for Exchange to know that an internal email address should be directed to an external mailbox.

An Internal Relay domain uses the send connector if an internal recipient is not found.

This behaviour should be the same for Exchange 2007/2010/2013. However, I don't have an Exchange 2007 test environment to v

Hi ,

Accepted domains in exchange is an organisation level parameter .So on that , if you set anyone of your domain as the authoritative domain in exchange then your exchange 2007 and exchange 2013 server will consider that we are responsible for holding the recipients of the domain .So on such case if your exchange servers (i.e 2007 & 2013 ) has found that the particular recipient is not available while trying to deliver the message then it will send an bounce back error message to the sender.

As per my knowledge accepted domains concept is same from exchange 2007,2010 and 2013 ..

Note : In exchange 2013 we do have an option to track the changes done by the administrator through Admin audit logging 

Please reply me if you have any qu

Perhaps there was a service restart involved that made this change take effect?? Anything in the application logs when the issue happened to state that new settings have been applied? Also, was mail flow migrated around the time of the issue?

Try look through the AD configuration using ADSIEDIT, you should find the path to the accepted domain settings. From here, you can use the below command to find out the attribute change history from AD replication:

repadmin /showmeta "CN=path to authoritative domains from ADSIEDIT" > dump.txt

My only guess is that the domain was previously an Internal Relay domain and it got changed to authoritative. If that's not the case, I'm stu

Perhaps there was a service restart involved that made this change take effect?? Anything in the application logs when the issue happened to state that new settings have been applied? Also, was mail flow migrated around the time of the issue?

Try look through the AD configuration using ADSIEDIT, you should find the path to the accepted domain settings. From here, you can use the below command to find out the attribute change history from AD replication:

repadmin /showmeta "CN=path to authoritative domains from ADSIEDIT" > du