Setup Exchange 2010 Mail Flow in .local AD DomainMustBeGeek

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Many organizations have .local domain as root domain in their Active Directory. For example, company.local, etc. .local domain names are not Internet routable. Meaning you won’t be able to send or receive emails to or from email address which contains .local SMTP address. In fact, you can’t have .local domain in your public DNS server like GoDaddy. So, when you install Exchange 2010 server on .local Active Directory environment, mail flow won’t work unless you add the routable domain properly. Routable domains are, .com, .net, .org, and so on. So in this post, I will show how to setup Exchange 2010 mail flow in .local AD domain environment.

Setup Exchange 2010 Mail Flow in .local AD Domain

Following diagram shows a simple scenario. AD root domain is mustbegeek.local. I have already installed new Exchange 2010 in the network. MBG-CAS01.mustbegeek.local server is installed with CAS and Hub Transport server role and MBG-MBX01.mustbegeek.local server is installed with Mailbox server role. The SMTP domain that we want to use for email addresses is, mustbegeek.com which is an Internet routable domain name. So the solution here is to setup mustbegeek.com as Accepted Domain, create new Email Address Policy, create new Send Connector, and then setup External and Internal URLs for accessing Exchange server.

I have also created couple of mailboxes. These mailboxes have mustbegeek.local SMTP address as primary email as of now. We need to change these to mustbegeek.com. When you install Exchange 2010, the default email address format is combination of Active Directory user alias, @ symbol and forest root domain name. Here, the root domain name is mustbegeek.local which is the reason why these email addresses have mustbegeek.local as primary SMTP address.

In order to change primary SMTP address from mustbegeek.local to mustbegeek.com we need to add new accepted domain and email address policy.

Open Exchange Management Console, Expand Organization Configuration. Select Accepted Domains tab. As you can see above mustbegeek.local is already added by default as accepted domain. Click New Accepted Domain from the Actions pane.

Type the name of the domain and choose authoritative domain as shown above. Then click New.

As shown above, new domain mustbegeek.com has been added. To make this domain default, right-click the domain and click Set as Default option as shown above. Click Yes on confirmation. Now, let’s configure Email Address Policy. EAP defines the format of email address of user or mailbox. To create EAP expand, Organization Configuration, select Hub Transport, select E-mail Address Policies tab. Click New E-mail Address Policy option from Actions pane.

Give name for the policy. Choose all recipient types since we want this policy to apply to all mailboxes. Click Next.

Click Next on Conditions.

Click Add. This is where you will specify the format of SMTP address or email address.

Choose use alias option for local part of email address and type new domain name for FQDN of the email address. Click OK.

Email address format is created. Click Next.

Choose Immediately option to apply the EAP right after it is created. You also have option to schedule for later date if you want. Click Next.

Review the summary of EAP above. And click New to create the EAP.

Click Finish after it is created. Now, you can see that the primary email address of mailboxes are now mustbegeek.com

In Exchange server, Receive Connectors and Send Connectors controls incoming and outgoing emails. By default Receive Connectors is not set to receive emails from anonymous users. So we need to change this.

Expand Server Configuration, select Hub Transport. Select the server. Under Receive Connectors double-click Default MBG-CAS01 connector.

Select Permission Groups tab. Check Anonymous users and click Apply. Now, the Exchange server will receive emails from Internet like gmail, hotmail, or other domain names. Now create Send Connector to be able to send emails from Exchange server or internal Exchange organization to the Internet, then configure external and internal URLs to access Exchange server from inside and outside.