In my consulting practice, I regularly encounter small businesses that have
developed niche services to fill a specialized need. To effectively market these
services, they use multiple "doing business as" (dba) names, each relevant to
a particular service. Invariably, such businesses need to maintain multiple
email identities to give customers a consistent view of the business. For instance,
the main line of business for the fictitious company Thomas and Associates might
be accounting, but the firm also sells a third-party software program under
the name Advanced Accounting Solutions and needs many of its employees to maintain
both the thomasassoc.com and aasolutions.com email domains. I'll show you the
easiest way to maintain multiple email identities in one Exchange mailbox without
using any special software. Letting users send and receive mail by using different
email addresses and only one Exchange mailbox per user is an important capability
for many small businesses because most don't want the hassle of maintaining
two different mailboxes.
Single Mailbox, Multiple Email Domains
Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 aren't well suited for
maintaining completely different email identities for one user and one mailbox.
Although you can assign multiple alias addresses to a single mailbox, Outlook
always sends email by using the primary email address. I'll show you how to
solve the sending problem later, but first you need to set up the Exchange server
to accept mail for both the thomasassoc.com and aasolutions.com email domains.
(Of course, you'll also need to set up appropriate MX records in the aasolutions.com
domain's zone file that direct email to your Exchange server, just as you'd
have done previously for thomasassoc.com.)
To do so, first open Exchange System Manager (ESM) from the Start menu on your
Exchange server. Select the Recipients\Recipient Policies folder. In this example,
you'll edit the Default Policy and simply add aasolutions.com to the already-existing
thomasassoc.com domain. Double-click Default Policy and, on the E-Mail Addresses
(Policy) tab, click New and add the new policy, which Figure
1 shows. Within a few minutes, Recipient Update Service (RUS) will add aasolutions.com
to all your user accounts that have mailboxes. Now user Bob, for example, can
receive email sent to bob@thomasassoc.com or bob@aasolutions.com. The email
will arrive in Bob's mailbox, and he can easily determine which of his addresses
the sender used by looking at the To: field in the email header.
The method I've just described will give every user an aasolutions.com alias.
If you want only certain users to be able to receive email at the aasolutions.com
domain, you can create a recipient policy without an LDAP filter. Such a policy
lets Exchange receive mail for the aasolutions.com domain, but since there's
no LDAP filter, the policy isn't applied to any users. Then, to selectively
enable specific users, you edit their accounts in the Microsoft Management Console
(MMC) Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in. On the Email Addresses tab,
add an SMTP address for the aasolutions.com domain.
When Bob replies to the message, however, Exchange and Outlook will always
send the message via his primary email address, which according to the recipient
policy that Figure 1 shows is bob@thomasassoc.com
(next to the SMTP type). Whether Bob creates a new message or replies to a message
received at the other address, there's no way for him to tell Outlook, "Send
this message from my other address, not my primary address."
Step 1: Configure Outlook
To enable a user to send messages from multiple accounts and only one mailbox,
you can set up a "dummy" POP account in the same Outlook profile that you use
to access the mailbox. You'll never use the POP account for receiving mail,
and there's no need to enable POP access on the server. Instead, you'll be using
the POP account configuration for sending mail via SMTP relay through Exchange.
Outlook lets you set up one or more accounts, such as POP, in addition to your
default Exchange account in an Outlook profile. When you've defined one or more
POP accounts and send a new message, Outlook lets you choose which account to
send the message from. The only thing you have to do on Exchange is configure
it to allow SMTP relay for your users (but not for the general public on the
Internet, unless you want to find your server on every open-relay database this
side of the Milky Way). Here are the steps to do so.
First configure Bob's Outlook profile to add a new POP account for bob@aasolutions.com. To do so, in Outlook select Tools, E-mail Accounts. In the E-mail Accounts dialog box, select Add a new e-mail account and click Next. On the wizard's Server Type page, which appears next, select POP3 and click Next.
On the Internet E-mail Settings (POP3) page, enter Bob's name and the bob@aasolutions.com
address. Enter anything you want in the Incoming mail server (POP3) box.
(You'll never use that setting, but the Outlook configuration wizard requires
some text to be entered.) In the Outgoing mail server (SMTP) box, enter
your Exchange server's address. If the Outlook client you're configuring is
on a laptop, make sure that the address works both inside your LAN and on the
Internet. Depending on your environment, you might need to take additional steps
on your firewall or Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA
Server) to publish the SMTP service on your Exchange server to the Internet.
However, most small environments will have one Exchange server accessible to
both the Internet and internal network. Enter any text in the User Name and
Password boxes. Your entries should look similar to those in Figure
2.
Click More Settings. In the Internet E-Mail Settings dialog box that's displayed,
select the Outgoing Server tab. Select the My outgoing server (SMTP) requires
authentication check box. Select Log on using and enter Bob's Active
Directory (AD) username and password. Next, select Log on using Secure Password
Authentication (SPA - also known as NTLM, a Windows authentication protocol)
to protect Bob's password when he sends mail as bob@aasolutions.com.
Click OK, then click Next. Now you'll configure Outlook so that it never tries
to retrieve email via this new POP account. To do so, select Tools, Send/Receive,
Send/Receive Settings, and Define Send/Receive Groups, which displays the Send/Receive
Groups dialog box. Select the All Accounts group and click Edit. In the Send/Receive
Settings-All Accounts dialog box, select the POP account you just created and
clear the Receive mail items check box.