Multiple Domains on a 2007 Exchange Server?

[Medde]

I have a question that is two fold and rather difficult from my research but I thought I would see if 2007 brings any benefit that 2k3 didn't.

1. I have a customer with a newly installed 2k7 Exchange Server that I did not setup. They have 5 different companies on it, as far as email is concerned. So each user that has a email address in each company is bob.a.com and bob.b.com and bob.c.com etc....

2. At the moment the desktops have pop3 accounts in their outlook to pull the email from the Exchange 2k7 machine. They want to have all the email from each domain flow into one box if possible and when they reply be able to send that email back to whomever it came from with the reply of the email that the message was sent to. (In other words they want an email that was sent to bob.c.com to come back as that instead of bob.a.com.)

3. Later they want to sell Service on this Exchange Server to their customers and give them their own domain on this Exchange Server.

4. This Exchange Server is on one domain right now such as server.a.local and I want to migrate it to another domain completely such as server.z.local. What is the best way to handle that? I will of course still need to have this Exchange Server hosting email for the above mentioned companies.

But what I am mostly concerned with now is two things. First how do I address the problem in 1 and 2 above. Second, how hard is it going to be to take that Exchange server off one domain and add it to another?

[DShack]

That's a crazy arrangement, but there's a couple of crazy answers.

The way you currently have the clients configured is pretty unideal, but in this situation, it's somewhat helpful. If you can create a separate Outlook pop3 account for each email address, Outlook will automatically use the same address the email was sent to as the reply address.

What that means though, is that your current mailbox arrangement will not be adequate. To make the solution I mentioned above work, you'd have to have a separate email box for each email address that a client wanted to use, which means checking the box that says "override address policy" and removing any additional addresses that would normally be created. So a user named bob would actually have to have five separate emailboxes, one under each domain name, and then the Outlook client would have to have all five accounts configured.

Another option would be to stop using POP3 and start using direct MAPI connections. You'd still have to configure all the separate mailboxes, but you'd connect to each account with Outlook's "Open Other User's Mailbox" feature, and each mailbox would show its own distinct inbox and folder hierarchy. And if you had "send-as" rights on the other accounts, replies would use the same reply address as was used for the inbound recipient address.

I'll just say straight up, those are convoluted and unworkable solutions. There is no good native solution. Want a better option?

http://victori.hypermart.net/smartreply2007.shtml

Using this, you could switch to MAPI and still have all the functionality. There's a working demo for testing.

Dave Shackelford

[Medde]

What is the pro's or con's of using Mapi?

[DShack]

MAPI is almost all "pro" and no "con". MAPI is what you see when you log into Outlook on a LAN with a local Exchange server, giving you full access to public folders, calendaring, out-of-office assistant, real-time message delivery, etc. POP3 and IMAP are both less than ideal and every organization's goal should be to get as much of their user population using MAPI as possible.

[Hanif]

Hey DShack,

I read your informative replies and thought i ask you a question of my own.

I am pretty much in the same situation as Medde with a newly installed EX2K7 and with 3 different domains. we have succesfully added the three domains in Accepted Domains. also, we have created the mailboxes for the users but the problem we are facing is that the email addresses for lets say an Active Directory user "bob" appear as bob@abc.com, bob@xyz.com and so on. We understand it is because we have a user created in the active directory with the name bob@mail.local. Now when we view the properties for this user and click on email Address for properties of user bob, we see all email address for 3 different domains starting with the same name.

We would like to know how to make it possible to have one AD user with 3 different email addresses and receive emails for all 3 different addresses in Outlook under a different profile? For example, user bob in AD be able to receive emails for bob@abc.com in a different outlook profile and bob@xyz.com to receive emails in a different outlook profile. We tried various things but to no avail. Any help to resolve this issue will be greatly appreciated. I hope we dont have to create a separate user in AD for each domain email address.

[DShack]

Hanif, I had to deal with a situation like that this morning. The only answer, if you want to use different profiles, is to actually create different mailboxes.

Add the new domain to the Accepted domains list, but don't configure it to assign those addresses to mailboxes. Then create some new mailboxes using a modified username like "Alt Bob Smith" and then configure that mailbox to disallow policy-based email address generation. Then manually configure the email address the way you want it on that account.

Now here's a question for you: why do you want them in different profiles? Is it because you want to be able to reply to incoming emails using separate reply addresses? It's easier to stick with a single profile, but still configure multiple mailboxes like I mentioned.

Just configure each additional mailbox to forward all mail to the main mailbox, and then give the main mailbox Send-As rights on the other mailboxes. That way when Bob gets a new email from one of the alternate addresses, he can hit "reply" and then change the "From" field to match the address that he wants to send the email out with. It's a bit of a hassle to set up on the admin side, but for the user it's a lot easier than having to juggle multiple profiles: the main all comes to the same place, they just need to choose which reply address to use.

Shack