Create a Contact of External SMTP Email Address Under Exchange Server 2007

Create a Contact of External SMTP Email Address Under Exchange Server 2007

There are situations when you (or any company user) want to send email to somebody outside your company like to an external contractor (with Google or Yahoo email address). Contacts come to rescue this need but to complete the external email flow; we have to create Send Connector. They will be covered in some other tutorial.  Today we will create a new contact ‘Vihaan Reddy’ with external yahoo email address.

 To perform this tutorial, the account you use must be delegated:

• Exchange Recipient Administrator role
• Account Operator role for the applicable Active Directory containers

Open Exchange Management Console (EMC) from Administrative Tools then right click on Recipient Configuration. This will open context menu like shown below. Select New Mail Contact… option.

 Above selection will result in New Mail Contact dialog box shown below. We are creating new contact so select New Contact radio option under ‘Create a mail contact for’ option then click Next.

This screen (below) asks for Contact Information of contact under creation. By default under Organizational unit, the New Mail Contact wizard displays the path to the Users container in the ‘Active Directory’ directory service. To modify this field, click Browse, and then select the organizational unit (OU) that you want. Enter First and Last Name with Initials. Once we are done with that we can provide External email address by dropping down Edit… button.

On dropdown we can see two options, SMTP Address… and Custom Address…, to enter External email address. For this tutorial, we are considering SMTP address only so click that option. For example, you can specify an X.400, GroupWise, or Lotus Notes address.

This will pop-up SMTP Address dialog box. Enter your desired external contact address, vihaanreddy99@yahoo.com, under Email address textbox then click OK.

On return, we can see the embedded external email address, vihaanreddy99@yahoo.com, under External email address. Click Next. 

This screen shows Configuration Summary for all settings we did for our contact. Revise it to see every thing is well documented then click New.

On Completion success we will see green icon or red on failure. Main reason for failure can be re-creation of existing user or contact. This screen also shows the shell command executed for New-Mail Contact. Click finish and we are done.

 Main EMC window will show new contact ‘Vihaan Reddy’, we just created.

If we open Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC), new contact will be there under Users folder of domain, ‘technoencyclopedia.local’ here.

Conclusion: This tutorial covers creation of a Contact for non-Microsoft Messaging System which is suitable for company external client interaction.

Adding External email to User account in Exchange Server 2007:

Continuing from last tutorial where we created mailbox enabled user under EMC, we can set external email address as primary for the user. This need can occur when your external contractor wants his domain emails to be forwarded on his non-Microsoft messaging systems.

Open EMC, select mailbox under Recipient Configuration then from middle pan select your mailbox, ‘Vihaan Reddy’ shown below.

Right-click on selected user-mailbox and select Properties.

This will pop-up General tab of User mailbox Properties. Select Email Address from the available tabs.

Opened tab shows the default domain SMTP address of the user. Click Add… to provide new, external, email address.

Now write the external email address, vihaanreddy99@yahoo.com here, and then Click OK.

 On return, external email address is still not default and ‘Set as reply’ is disabling for it so we uncheck the option: Automatically update e-mail addresses based on e-mail address policy.

This enables ‘Set as Reply’ button when external email is selected. Clicking the button will make external being default email address of the user.

Highlighted external e-mail address, vihannreddy99@yahoo.com, confirms our instinct. Click Apply and Ok; we are done.

Difference can be seen under Primary SMTP Address of the selected user-mailbox, ‘Vihaan Reddy’. After you have changed the default email address - it will not be changed automatically in the AD.

Sent & Received Email Screenshots

Conclusion: This tutorial teaches you how to set external e-mail address as default of the user. This process of removing the ‘Automatically update e-mail addresses based on recipient policy’ in order to change the default email address, is by design.