Exchange headaches

[steelrazor]

Would anyone care to soothe my troubled mind?

 

Basically, I'm tying myself in knots trying to get my head round how external mail works in Exchange.

 

what i know so far

 

Our current e-mail system "Mailtraq" looks up a POP3 account held with Blueyonder, there is an address for the POP3 server which is an IP and has account and password details attached. E-mails are then retrieved and sorted through Mailtraq. I've also found an IP address for a remote mail server under the outgoing mail settings.

 

The MX record points to these :

20 mail2.cableinet.net

10 inmail1.cableinet.co.uk

 

Internal mail works fine and i've been able to send an email from the administrator to my own account.

 

 

Exchange server is sitting on the admin network with the admin DC which is all behind a firewall (port 25 should be open already for SMTP).

 

 

Any help would be really really helpful!

 

Matt

[Simcfc73]

I use exchange at this school.

 

1) Are Blueblunder forwarding your SMTP mail to you. Our MX record is held with our ISP and they forward our mail to us. If they hold the MX record then you need to make sure that they are forwarding it to you.

 

2) If they are then try telneting to your exchange server, try it internally and then from home. This will tell you if port 25 is accessible.

 

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/guides/E2k3TransnRouting/32e85e48-1a58-46c3-8f0d-f94df467ad41.mspx?mfr=true

 

3) Are the addresses for the MX records pointing to the correct domain accounts?

 

Try these.

[NetworkGeezer]

Erm, what is the actual problem?

 

1) Can't send email to external sites?

 

2) Can't receive email from external sites?

[NetworkGeezer]

If the problem is with recieiving emails then you then it might be because two different models of mail delivery are being used.

 

Mailtraq currenlty pulls the email from the POP account and then files it into the approriate mail box.

Exchange normally relies on a mail relay at the ISP pushing the inboudn emails to it.

 

If you can't convince your ISP to change from pull to push then you may need ot use a POP gateway program such as POPWeasel to get the emails from the POP3 account into exchange.

[steelrazor]

I think what might be the problem is not having an external IP for the exchange server. Can't receive emails and.... don't think i can send either, i'm sure i've tested that (been on holiday since and have a terrible memory).

[Simcfc73]

If your router / firewall has a external IP then forward all port 25 traffic to your internal exchange server.

 

Sending email you could just get away with making a connector and putting the DNS settings in it, although you may need to set up a smarthost depending on your ISP.

[NetworkGeezer]

Yes and unless you have told the ISP that you want inbound email for you school to forward to a nomimate school IP address then it will go to the POP collection account.

[Alex]

you need a couple of things.

 

I Assume you have a fixed IP on your internet connection?

 

For the domain you want to have email for, speak to whoever hosts your nameservers / domains and create an 'A' record - e.g. mail.mydomainname.com. pointing at the fixed IP address of your internet connection.

 

Then create a primary / mx5 / 10 record with your newly created hostname (mail.domainname.com).

 

You then need to get your router / firewall to port forward port 25 from your external IP to the internal one of your exchange box.

 

 

When someone sends an email to you, their mail server does a DNS lookup on the domain name. It will find that the MX (mail exchanger) record is the IP address of your internet connection. The server will directly initiate a connection with your server sat behind the firewall, through the port forward and send you the mail.

 

You can test your mail server from an external PC (e.g. if you can VNC to your box at home), by telnetting on to port 25 of the A record you set up / IP address.

 

e.g.

 

telnet

open mail.mydomain.com (or the IP) 25

HELO mail.testing.co.uk

MAIL FROM: [email protected]

RCPT TO: [email protected]

DATA

.

 

 

What you should also do, is contact your ISP to get them to allow you to use their mailservers as a secondary MX.

 

Then, if your mail server goes down messages are queued at the isp, & filter back to your server when it comes back up.

[steelrazor]

Cheers, appreciate the help.

At the moment I've got to hunt down someone whoever's responsible and get them to sort me out with a fixed IP. So far, Education Bradford point there finger at Blueyonder and at Blueyonder it's the person who's responsible for our account, not surprisingly the guy hasn't rung me back yet.

 

I wish people working at Blueyonder were as helpful as people on here!!