Outgoing Mail in Exchange & Other Stuff

[lovelldr]

Hi guys.

Just wondered if someone could help me out with this quick query. It's probably something really simple and not worth the worry, but since I haven't much experience with exchange, I thought I'd ask...

I have currently set up my exchange 2007 server, and all appears to be ok atm, in terms of I can log in with a user, send emails between users, and use outlook web access...

A bit of history on this, is that currently, we use the EMBC portal to handle our emails. So all users and email accts have been set up to be handled by embc.

I now want to change this over to the exchange server I have set up, which I gather is just a simple job of me going into the webview, and specifying the interal server on webview to this server.

EMBC told me that they will hold all email in the queue for 10 days, so shouldn't have a problem with the receiving of emails etc.

One thing I just want to check though, I tried sending an email to my home email address, (not expecting it to work really), and it doesn't get through (as expected). But I'm just checking that it shouldn't get through?

As I said, I have little knowledge of Exchange, so maybe I haven't set things up right? In Organisation Management -> Hub Transport -> Send Connectors, I have created one called "Outside Email". I set the intended use as Internet, for the address space, I entered *, left the sending to "Use DNS MX records to route" and left "Use External DNS Lookup settings on transport server" unchecked, and had the source server as this exchange server...

Did I set this up correctly? Am I right to not expect it to get sent?

When I get EMBC to send emails through to my exchange server, will all this work? Will I receive emails and send emails straight away?

I haven't really done anything apart from install exchange, add an offline address book and add this send connector. Should I set something else up for this to work?

All help greatfully received

Also, when I finally get this working, I was thinking of getting each user to download their current email through pop3, and then copy this to the exchange server, just so that they have their current emails. Is this a correct way of doing this?

Also, I don't want users to have pop3 access at home, so I assume this hasn't been set up yet in exchange? They can just access the email through owa (which was set up as default). Anything else I need to do?

Sorry for all these newb questions. Just that I never had to set up exchange before...

Thanks again

[Ric_]

1. Sening emails out: You don't need an external connector. As long as your DNS is configured correctly the default settings should be fine unless port 25 is blocked.

2. If port 25 is blocked: You will have to use the RBC smarthost (I am in a different RBC so cannot help too much here). Basically, the smarthost acts as a sort of proxy to send your mail out.

3. By default POP3 and IMAP is disabled: If you want to enable it you will need to change the startup type of the services.

4. To allow external access: You will need to configure your firewall and make sure that some kind of reverse proxy or port forwarding is put in place by your RBC. There are also numerous security considerations.

[tazz]

Hi

I am trying to do the same thing as lovelldr, with Exchange 2003. Internal mail is fine, but EMBC insist that they won't open port 25.

What is an RBC smarthost please? Oh, and what's a reverse proxy too?!

[Jobos]

With EMBC you need to open Exchange system manager and drill down to:

Administrative groups/First Administrative group/Servers/<Server name>/Protocols/SMTP/Default SMTP Virtual Server/Properties/Delivery/Advanced

In Smart host enter smtp.embc.org.uk that will route all outgoing emails via the EMBC servers. Port 25 inbound is blocked so all emails have to go through the EMBC email scanning.

[GrumbleDook]

All inbound and outbound mail traffic (to and from servers) has to be run through the EMBC mail filtering service. This is part of the Becta accreditation of the RBC (the fully accredited mail service is the hosted solution as it also has internal filtering, ie between users on the system).

The store and forward service included as part of the email system needs to have the IP address (or hostname) of your mail server.

Once you have filled in the details in webview of the IP of your mail server it will be put into the EMailSystem control panel for your domain/site as the mailer host record.

No changes to your MX records in DNS are required at EMBC level.

EMBC hold emails in the queue on the EmailSystems filters ... this means that you can get them to change the mailer host setting and it will work pretty much automatically, but any existing mail that has already been routed to Mirapoint will not be pulled down again.

I am presently looking at ways that schools on Mirapoint can pull down existing mailboxes onto Exchange to make life easy for migrating to the new learning platform in Northants ... this is also something being looked at by EMBC anyone for migration to the new contract starting in April.

If there is anything else EMBC specific (arguing about ports being opened, domains being used, etc) let me know.

[Jobos]

Yes, the EMBC mail filtering needs work. I’m all for having a good system in place but when a mail gets caught by the filter the sender should get an immediate response saying the mail was undeliverable and giving the reason. I’ve sent mail through the EMBC containing the phrase ‘cock and bull story’ which the filter deleted and was not informed of the fact. I believe notification of this is a requirement of RFC the number of which escapes me.

[tazz]

Thank you Jobos - I now have outbound mail - working on the inbound now!

[Geoff]

Yes, the EMBC mail filtering needs work. I’m all for having a good system in place but when a mail gets caught by the filter the sender should get an immediate response saying the mail was undeliverable and giving the reason. I’ve sent mail through the EMBC containing the phrase ‘cock and bull story’ which the filter deleted and was not informed of the fact. I believe notification of this is a requirement of RFC the number of which escapes me.

Erk no. Can you imagine the back scatter from a spam run using forged sender addresses?

[Jobos]

So are you saying we should configure our Exchange boxes not to issue NDR’s?

[Geoff]

It depends. How fine grained control do you have over the circumstances that NDRs are generated on Exchange?

[Jobos]

With Exchange you can set NDR's on or off. EMBC uses a third party program to scan the mails so I would expect it to be able to tell the difference between spam and keyword filtering from mails originating from a EMBC served school.

[Geoff]

Ok, if it's only got a simplistic on/off setting, I'd leave it off.

[GrumbleDook]

Although we don't do it and I do not have the manual in front of me I am sure that EmailSystems (the filter used by EMBC) also allows you to allow spam through but with [SPAM] in the subject line and even an injected header to denote spam ... this can be used by your mail server to filter out, or if you have a 3rd party filter internal to your school it cna be used to quarantine whilst you allow staff to see whether it really is SPAM.

We sort of had this by using MailMarshal but we decided that the cost was not worth it at the moment.

[Jobos]

I’m not saying to allow spam through, but when I send mail to a headteacher of another school and the mail gets dropped because of the filters I expect to be told of the fact so I can resend it. It makes people look stupid when I ask about emails I had supposedly not sent.

[srochford]

But how can the filter know that the email which comes from you which looks a bit like spam needs an NDR, whereas the email which is pretending to come from you and looks a bit like spam doesn't need an NDR because it really is spam?

You just have to make sure that people know that email does not guarantee delivery (any more than postal mail or fax) unless you ask the recipient to acknowledge receipt of important email. If you then get a personal response (I'm not talking about the automatic responses) then you know it has been delivered; if you don't, then you have to assume that delivery has failed for some reason.