Setting up Exchange 2003

[jpshephard]

Please could someone point me in the right direction? I have just set up exchange 2003 on a windows server 2003 machine. This is not one of my DC's. I have set up clients successfully - sharing calenders, global address lists, send/recv internal email etc....BUT, I would like to use exchange to host my external email. At school we have a domain (aylshamhigh.com) registered with Zen and I am aware that there are mx records (but know nothing more here) and that they can be changed. My understanding is that I need to change the MX record with Zen - but do not know what to, and also what changes do i need to make on my exchange server and where exactly - exchange systems manager, IIS, etc??? Finally if it helps, I do have a reverse proxy set up on the server for the purposes of ePortal (web based software) which I think is what I need for this issue?

 

Any clues/suggestions will be much appreciated.

[teejay]

The MX record should point to your external static IP address and you will need to set up port forwarding on your firewall to send traffic on port 25 to your exchange server. This gets more complicated if you're LEA are providing the internet access as you will have to speak to them about how they want it set up. We have to have our MX record pointing to the LEA's mail server which then forwards onto us.

In Exchange you need to set up in system manager the domain to allow it to accept mail for your domain. You will also have to give each user an mail address in that domain.

[powdarrmonkey]

The MX record should point to your external static IP address and you will need to set up port forwarding on your firewall to send traffic on port 25 to your exchange server.

 

Actually the MX record should contain a valid 'A' or 'AAAA' DNS name which in turn resolves to your external IP. It should not contain either an IP address or a CNAME.

 

You can call the A record anything you like, but the convention is something like mx.aylshamhigh.com, mail.aylshamhigh.com, or similar. You may find MX record - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia helpful.

[jpshephard]

Thanks for the tips guys, I have already made progress but more by luck than anything else. I have now established that I can send email externally from within school (in my case using [email protected]) with every success, but I cannot then receive email from outside back to this address. I think this is where County come in(our provider)! The sender to our addresses receives an error message back in the form of:

 

SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:

host smtp.nsix.org.uk [194.**.**.***]: 550 5.7.1

 

(i've purposely masked some of the IP)

 

It then goes on to say contact County if we deem this to be incorrect. I presume this is probably a security measure put in place by County. I would guess the final step to complete this process would be for County to probably open the correct ports?

 

Finally, does anyone know of any good filtering software I can put on my exchange server, ideally not mega-expensive - perhaps a free trial of something??

 

Thanks again

[Dos_Box]

If you have a Technet subscription I would suggest trying AntiGen for Exchange.

You can get more details and a free trial here: http://www.microsoft.com/antigen/default.mspx

It's easy to setup and even easier to use, and considering it does AV and spam all in one package using many of the industries leading detection engines (Kaspersky, Sophos etc) it provides great protection. It not only does scanning on receiving the mail, but you can have it scan existing mail stores too.

[powdarrmonkey]

@Dos_Box: What's the significance of Technet, does the subscription include an Antigen license?

[hancym]

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