Configuring Routing for Internal Mail Flow

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Because routing is the path messages travel from a sender to a recipient, a well-planned routing topology is required for efficient mail flow in your Exchange organization. Carefully evaluate your existing network infrastructure, before you plan your routing topology.

Note

Although this section focuses on the components of your routing topology and how they affect message flow in your organization, it does not discuss all the planning considerations and various routing topologies in detail.

In its default state, Exchange Server 2003, like Exchange 2000 Server, functions as though all servers in an organization are part of a single, large routing group. That is, any Exchange server can send mail directly to any other Exchange server in the organization. However, in environments with varying network connectivity and geographical distribution, you can increase message flow efficiency by creating routing groups and routing group connectors in accordance with your network infrastructure. By creating routing groups and routing group connectors, servers in a routing group still send messages directly to each other, but they use the routing group connector on those servers with the best network connectivity to communicate with servers in another group.

This section discusses what routing groups are and how to create and configure routing groups and routing group connectors to manage internal mail flow. Then, because network topologies and environments change, this section also covers how to make adjustments to your routing topology, such as moving servers between routing groups, renaming routing groups, and deleting routing groups.

Note

If you are operating Exchange on a single server, most of the topics about routing groups do not apply to your organization. However, you may find these topics useful if you plan to expand your messaging system to support multiple servers.

For detailed instructions, see How to Disable Outbound Mail.

For detailed instructions, see How to Disable a Connector.

For detailed instructions, see How to Remove a Connector.