Exchange Help

[borris-bear]

We have a strange email set up here that currently isnt working and hoping someone can help.

We use an external company to host our email so have a pop and smtp server but also have an exchange server for handling internal mails.
Each client is set up with the 2 accounts pop and exchange (the pop accounts need a username & password)
Yesterday i had to switch ADSL accounts and ever since anyone in the office on Outlook 2000 cant send external emails they go from the outbox but never end up at their destination.
Outlook 2003 is fine as you can set which email account to use as default (in this case the POP account and everything works fine)
I found on exchange administrator (5.5) under Configuration > Connections a setting "Forward all messages to host" which was filled in with an smtp address of the old ADSL supplier i switched this to point to the same server as the clients but emails still not going out.

My assumption is that Outlook 2000 is sending the external mails to the Exchange Server rather than directly to the external smtp server. This is then trying to forward the emails, firstly to the old ADSL supplier who had obviously stopped this service, now to our external server which i'm guessing is blocking them because theres no authentication coming from the exchange server?

Is there a way of forcing Outlook 2000 to send external mails straight to the external smtp server? or making the exchange server not accept mails other than internal ones forcing the Outlook client to try its other account which should work?

any help much appreciated.

[aldi]

You could configure it not to use a forwarder at all but to go MX direct, or for the forwarder the issue might be that your new ISPs smtp server needs authentication. I'm sure someone will be allong soon to tell you how to do that, I can't remember it blind at the mo!

[BliarOut]

On your exchange server from a command prompt type the following

telnet yourisp.smtpservers.ipaddress 25

And see if it echo's back to you. Let us know what happens. Once we know the result of that we can diagnose the problem pretty quickly.

[borris-bear]

telnet comes up with

220 relay01.mail.uk1.eechost.net ESMTP Exim 4.50 Thu, 16 Feb 2006 14:26:03 +0000

thanks for any help.

[BliarOut]

Ok, so port 25 is open to the upstream smarthost which is good. Next step is to follow this link to try and spam yourself. Don't worry, it's quite safe. Just use your own e-mail address as the from and to addresses. You should be able to e-mail yourself by telnetting onto the upstream ISP

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/15311

Chances are you'll get an error message which will point to the problem. My money is on the new ISP needing to reconfigure their servers to allow you to send through their mail relay.

[BliarOut]

Hang on, just reread the original post. The telnet method should work and you'll get your test e-mail if I am reading this right. Outlook 2003 can send via the new ISP so the problem is Ex 5.5 either restart the IMC or failing that the server. That should clear it.

[borris-bear]

Tried rebooting a few time all no good.

I have resolved the problem now with the company whos been doing the ADSL switch for us opening up their mail server to allow incoming smtp messages from our external IP address.
So this must point to the new ISP not having an open smtp server all the ones we use need authentication. But theres nowhere in Exchange 5.5 to put in a username password for the forwarding server.

I'm going to see if i can set up the exchange server here to forward smtp messages itself and not rely on external 3rd parties for message delivery

thanks for your help.