Exchange 2003 is set with x.com users who need to have a reply SMTP set as y.com. the y.com domain is setup on an external mail server and relays the y.com reply back to the x.com on our exchange server. What is the best practice for setting up exchange. Should y.com be put in a recipient policy set as primary for an OU of users. Recently this was the case until it was added the the default policy causing the emails to other external y.com users stopping relaying the emails as they are not in the organisation. By deleting the y.com from policies allowed this to work again. I manually add the new SMTP y.com to their email addresses in AD. I do not know what is the best practice for setting up this type of service and what problem in can cause. Advice would be greatly appreciated. Peter

If you want to receive mail for y.com you must have y.com in your recipient policy. The rest of your problem suggests to me that you have a mail routing issue that I can't help much with without more information. -- Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems." . "Peteremilio" wrote in message news:93d24a70-936d-400f-a39f-941adeb2fb3f... Exchange 2003 is set with x.com users who need to have a reply SMTP set as y.com. the y.com domain is setup on an external mail server and relays the y.com reply back to the x.com on our exchange server. What is the best practice for setting up exchange. Should y.com be put in a recipient policy set as primary for an OU of users. Recently this was the case until it was added the the default policy causing the emails to other external y.com users stopping relaying the emails as they are not in the organisation. By deleting the y.com from policies allowed this to work again. I manually add the new SMTP y.com to their email addresses in AD. I do not know what is the best practice for setting up this type of service and what problem in can cause. Advice would be greatly appreciated. Peter Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

Thanks for the reply. x.com is my default policy but y.com is set in users email addresss as y.com. The y.com has it own external email server that is used by other external organisations/users. The email server forwards on the reply of y.com to x.com which my exchange picks up. I am asking for advice on how this should be set up if you add y.com in a recipient policy it treats it as an internal domain so will not route it to and external y.com user. I had it in a policy set to an OU for the reply to be y.com and this worked. But playing around with policies i put it in the default policy and it stopped users sending to those esternal y.com users as it thinks the y.com is part of the exchange organisation. I have removed this domain from policies and it now send fine. I have had to add the y.com domain manually to users and unticked update polices. I dont know why this worked before but i was after advice in how to best apply this to my exchange. Is it alright not to have a recipient policy for a email domain? What problems could i encounter? should i be setting up a connector the y.com domains mail server. Thanks Peter

If y.com is not in your recipient policy, Exchange will not accept mail for it from outside Exchange. If you have a recipient with address joe@y.com address, any mail you send from Exchange to joe@y.com will go to the Exchange recipient. If you want to accept mail for y.com addresses, but still allow mail to go to another server that handles mail for y.com, then in recipient policy ensure that for y.com the checkbox "This Exchange Organization is responsible for all mail delivery to this address" is cleared. If you want all y.com mail delivered to a specific server, then it is probably a good idea to create a SMTP connector with y.com in the address space and the server configured as the smart host. -- Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems." . "Peteremilio" wrote in message news:2bb38fba-d958-4352-89ae-0eafb5df1d64... Thanks for the reply. x.com is my default policy but y.com is set in users email addresss as y.com. The y.com has it own external email server that is used by other external organisations/users. The email server forwards on the reply of y.com to x.com which my exchange picks up. I am asking for advice on how this should be set up if you add y.com in a recipient policy it treats it as an internal domain so will not route it to and external y.com user. I had it in a policy set to an OU for the reply to be y.com and this worked. But playing around with policies i put it in the default policy and it stopped users sending to those esternal y.com users as it thinks the y.com is part of the exchange organisation. I have removed this domain from policies and it now send fine. I have had to add the y.com domain manually to users and unticked update polices. I dont know why this worked before but i was after advice in how to best apply this to my exchange. Is it alright not to have a recipient policy for a email domain? What problems could i encounter? should i be setting up a connector the y.com domains mail server. Thanks Peter Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

Thank you I had forgotten about that checkbox. As for the smtp connecter I was thinking about doing this. The reason for the post was to get advice just so that I am configuring it correctly. Nice to get help from the professionals Thanks. In fact I have installed exch 2010 and have started moving the mailboxes across. So I now have to check the way it is done in this new version. I need to study again as the recent changes to server 2008 and exchange 2010 are vast. Again Thanks. Peter

You're welcome, happy to help. -- Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems." . "Peteremilio" wrote in message news:09a4e222-3f19-4f25-924e-d6fb5ac9bc2b... Thank you I had forgotten about that checkbox. As for the smtp connecter I was thinking about doing this. The reason for the post was to get advice just so that I am configuring it correctly. Nice to get help from the professionals Thanks. In fact I have installed exch 2010 and have started moving the mailboxes across. So I now have to check the way it is done in this new version. I need to study again as the recent changes to server 2008 and exchange 2010 are vast. Again Thanks. Peter Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

I apologize up-front for being completely new to exchange... I have a similar situation to the original poster to this thread, and followed the suggested fix but appear to still have the problem of exchange not routing mail addressed to it's own domain via smtp to the outside. This exchange server is only presently used as a container for storing mail so it is not routing any incoming or outgoing email except for SBS 2003 reports and therein lies the problem. Right now there is no incoming pop3 traffic that exchange is handling. And the only SMTP traffic it is handling is the SBS daily reports. One of the addressee's on the reports has the native domain name in the email address and as a consequence is not getting the reports delivered to this email account which is handled by an outside server. Under recipient policy - default policy there is the domain.com and domain.local listed in email address policy. I have unchecked the box in the properties of the domain.com that says 'the exchange organization is responsible for all mail delivery to this address. Also under routing groups - SMTP small business connector - I specified the local domain (domain.com) under the address space tab, bubble selected for the entire organization and checked 'allow messages to be relayed to these domains. But when I send out server reports the messages DO get delivered to the emails on the non-native domain (outside domain.com), but still aren't getting delivered to the address with the native (domain.com). Also the messages seem to get stuck in the exchange queue - C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\Mailroot\vsi 1\Queue Maybe you can advise all the specific settings that this exchange server should have for the mail designated for it's native domain, to get routed as it should to the outside email server that is hosting/routing the email. Thank you, Jonathan