How to Verify that Recipient Policies Do Not Contain Addresses that Match the FQDN

Exchange Server uses recipient policies to determine which messages should be accepted and internally routed to mailboxes in your organization. Recipient policies that are configured improperly can disrupt message flow for some or all recipients in your messaging system. To ensure that your recipient policies are configured properly, verify the following:

• Verify that recipient policies do not contain an SMTP address that matches the FQDN of any Exchange servers in your organization. For example, if you have @exchangeserver*.*example*.*com listed as an SMTP address and as a domain name on any recipient policy, it prevents mail from routing to other servers in the routing group.

• Verify that the domain for which you want to receive SMTP mail is listed on a recipient policy—either on the default policy or another recipient policy. By verifying this, you ensure that your users can receive mail from other SMTP domains.

• Verify that you configured the necessary SMTP e-mail addresses to receive e-mail messages for additional domains. If you are not receiving e-mail messages for all of your SMTP domains, you may need to configure additional SMTP addresses for your recipients. For example, some of your users may currently receive e-mail messages addressed to contoso.com, but you also want them to receive e-mail addressed to fourthcoffee.com.

Perform the following procedure to verify that your recipient policies are configured correctly and match your mail domain (for example, @example.com) rather than the FQDN of your Exchange server (for example, @exchange.example.com).

For more information about why recipient policies cannot match the FQDN of Exchange servers, see Microsoft Knowledge Base article 288175, "XCON: Recipient Policy Cannot Match the FQDN of Any Server in the Organization, 5.4.8 NDRs." Although this article is written for Exchange 2000, the same principles apply to Exchange 2003.

Before You Begin

Before you perform the procedure in this topic, read Connecting Exchange to the Internet.

The following permissions are required to perform this procedure:

• Member of the local administrators group and a member of a group that has had the Exchange Administrators role applied at the administrative group level

Procedure

To verify that your recipient policies do not contain addresses that match the FQDN

1. In the console tree, expand Recipients, and then click Recipient Policies.

2. In the details pane, right-click a recipient policy that is configured on the server, and then click Properties.

3. On the E-Mail Addresses (Policy) tab of that policy, view the SMTP addresses that are configured by that policy and ensure that none of the SMTP addresses match the FQDN of any Exchange servers in your organization.

   SMTP addresses on a recipient policy

   

4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 of this procedure for each recipient policy that is configured on this server.