Allowing anonymous relay on Exchange 2007/2010 on connectors for programs to send via SMTP using your Mail servers and how to secure it for internal use only.

, ,

I was recently helping out a colleague at another school as they were having difficulty in a specialised application sending e-mails to external addresses.  After a bit of investigating we found that the send connector configured for internet e-mail wasn’t allowing anonymous connections to it (which is dangerous) but since this particular application didn’t allow us to specify authentication details we were forced to enable anonymous relay for this connector.

I will first show you the PowerShell command that we used to grant the anonymous permissions for the connector that you specify:

Get-ReceiveConnector "Default SBSSERVER" | Add-ADPermission -User "NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON" -ExtendedRights "Ms-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Any-Recipient"

Now the above is really one command getting piped into another, so first of all we are specifying a particular receive connector, in this case Default SBSSERVER (change this to reflect the connector you want to modify).  We are then simply giving rights to anonymous logons (anyone) telling exchange to accept any recipient.

Now as for securing this connector, I would strongly suggest creating a separate one for this particular application (for example Sales App Connector).  We then add incoming IP restrictions, by editing the properties of the receive connector and adding entries to Receive mail from remote servers that have these IP addresses using either specific IP addresses or IP ranges in CIDR notation (so 10.1.0.0/16).

And there you have it, allowing anonymous connections / relay for internal applications to use.


Leave a Reply

More Posts

How to protect all existing Organizational Units (OUs) in your Active Directory domain from Accidental Deletion by using PowerShell

We recently took on a new hire, although I was confident in their ability in managing Active Directory I wanted to take an extra step in protecting Organizational units from deletion.  I was sure that I could do this quickly using PowerShell instead of right-clicking each of our 80 odd OUs and going into their […]

Bypassing Anti-Spam on an Exchange 2007/2010 Receive Connector

I was looking at an old Exchange environment that was being used to send bulk mail outs. We noticed every now and again a bunch of e-mails would not be getting sent, trawling through Message Tracking Logs we could see that the messages were failing because of an AGENT FAIL which usually means that there […]

Fixing Windows cannot connect to printer with Error Error 0x0000007e when shared on Windows Server 2003 or 2008 32 bit (x86) and your client is 64 bit

So I was out installing a new laptop for a client recently, their server infrastructure is very old (they’re still running Server 2003 but about to migrate) and doing the final stage of the deployment I was installing the local printer in the office but got Windows cannot Connect to the Printer (0x0000007e) error every […]