Thanks for the information. I had the thought of registering an additional domain name in order to test the server. I am new to exhange and our current email is hosted at our ISP; so I wanted to make sure the mail server is working before I go live. Is I get email working in the .local domain, to some extent it should work in the .com?

I understand (to some point) that an email account is an extention of an AD account. I have a few questions regarding this.

1) We currently have email accounts for users that do not have an account in AD. I assume that I need to create these accounts in AD? Also, if the users do not need access to the internal computers (only email) should I put them in a different OU that restricts access? When I created a user in Exchange 2007, it created a user in the Domain Users OU in AD. I do not think this is what I want.

2) I have a small amount of email users (30-40); so creating the extra users by hand is not problem. Should I manually create the users, switch the MX record and then migrate the mail?

3) I am also a little confused because out internal domain end in a “.local” which is different than our email. Is there anything I need to do differently because the exchange server is in the .local and not in the .com?

Thanks again.

As far as I am aware this is an all or nothing scenario, as you (or your ISP) are updating the mx records on an internet facing DNS server pointing to where your e-mail will be delivered to. The only way I could think of independantly testing this would be to register another domain name and message around with the config to prove your solution works (obviously don’t do this with your live environment!) Not having dealt with Exchange 07 I will have to take a guess but I cannot see it being far from exchange 03 config, a standard recipient policy should allready be in place, if not create it using ESM, you will then need to setup the “Internet Mail SMTP Connector” which can be run by right clicking the Exchange organisation name and running through the wizard.

There is no need to create extra Org units for exchange mailboxes, an exchange mailbox is an extension or attribute of a domain user account.