Managing email from two different domains on SBS 2003

This tip has been around for quite some time, and we use it at several of our customers. I'm posting it here so that some of our newer techs will have a good reference location for it.

For E-mail, the first thing you need to do is make sure your Internet domain's MX records are pointing to your SBS server's IP address, feel free to use backup a MX record, or even dynamic dns (I do!), depending on your own situation. For the first email domain, follow the normal SBS wizards (Primarily CEICW) to configure your first and primary domain that you will want to use.

Adding additional domains to Exchange To do this, we're going to edit the default recipient policy:

• From Server Management, expand Advanced Management, First Organization, Recipients and select Recipient Policies
• Right-click on the Default Policy and choose Properties
• On the E-Mail Address (Policy) tab, click the New button
• Select SMTP Address from the list and click OK
• Type in the name of the domain in the format @domain.com and choose OK. Leave the check box checked
• Check the box next to your new domain in the Default Domain Properties window, and click OK

Now that you've added this into the policy, Exchange will become aware of this domain and start responding to mail from it. This change will take effect the next time Exchange updates its policies, but you can force the change.

• Select the Recipient Update Service from the console
• Right-click on both policies on the right and choose Update Now

This forces Exchange to update the policies now, so you don't have to wait.

You will now be able to notice all of your users have an 3 email addresses:

• user@domain.local - added by SBS for your internal domain. It's suggested you keep this email address for this user as it is used by some SBS tools
• user@domain1.com - this is the first domain you added using CEICW
• user@domain2.com - this is the second domain you just added

That's as far as I went, since I wanted all my users to receive email from both domains, but what if you don't want this? Micro-manage! To micromanage which users have which email addresses simply:

• Change to the Users' snap-in and right-click on a user
• On the E-mail Addresses snap-in, uncheck the box at the bottom that says Automatically update e-mail addresses based on receipient policy
• Remove any email address you don't want the user to receive email at and add any additional email addresses in your configured domains. Don't forget to keep the domain.local e-mail address!
• Set the primary one to be the email address the user will send email as

There you have it, if your domain MX records are configured correctly, the SBS box will receive e-mail for both domains!

You can add any number of domains using this process. Moreover, you can add any number of email addresses to a specific user within a given domain using micromanage tactics.