Letting Exchange accept Mail from other domains

One of the usual things I perform as an IT Consultant is maintenance and configuration tasks on Exchange. One of the most requested tasks is accepting e-mail for more than one domain. Most of my clients run Windows SBS Server 2008 which comes with Exchange 2007. In this article I will walk through accepting mail from other domains.

Firstly, open up the management console, expand Organization Configuration, click on Hub Transport and finally select the Accepted Domains tab. Now under the Actions for Hub Transport click New Accepted Domain…

The New Accepted Domain window now pops up. Configure it with your new domain.  The domain must be yours and  its MX record configured to point to your exchange server. After you enter your domain, there are three options to tell exchange how to handle mail. Authoritative Domain tells the exchange server to accept ALL e-mail for this domain, if a user doesn’t exist then an NDR is generated and sent to the sender. The Internal and External relay options are handy, if you have multiple domains with multiple exchange servers, you can choose the Internal Relay option, which will look for other exchange servers under the forest for your entire organisation.

The third option is the External Relay. This is useful for those domains which you don’t ‘own’.  A prime example are franchise companies. Which may have one e-mail for a particular store or location, allowing you to send and receive for that domain to users not on your exchange server.

And That’s it. Simply ensure that the domain’s MX Record is pointing to your server, or if you are using the SBS POP3 Connector this will now properly process e-mails for that particular domain.

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