Some of you are already aware of my work situation. We are a joint venture of two companies (we will call them Parent-A and Parent-B) and our work environment is amazingly complex. We've probably got under 200 employees but they are all over the US, Canada, India, New Zealand, and even in Brazil. Many of our “offices” are small 2 to 10 people embedded within the facilities of one of the parents. They use the parent’s computers, email, etc…
The issue that I am experiencing is with email and I would like to know what suggestions you guys might have for us. We have a number of distribution lists that have users from both parents on them. So you will find
jsmith@parent-a.com and
bjones@parent-b.com on the same list. The list’s address will be
some_group@parent-a.com. When people with parent-b addresses send email to the some_group list it goes to the parent-a Exchange server and is expanded and then mailed back out to the users with parent-b addresses looking as if the parent-a server is spoofing a parent-b email address. Of course the mail is blocked. There is no way in this world that we can request anything to be done (such as white listing) from parent-b. Parent-b’s IT would not even answer our emails. It is not an option – do not make any suggestions regarding action from parent-b.
What we are thinking of doing is creating a list server that would hold all of our “distribution groups” on our own domain name so that we could completely by pass any of either parent’s infrastructures. But, this brings up issues of retention and management, etc. I was wondering if there were any scenarios such as leveraging parent-a’s Exchange server and doing some sort of re-write. I’m just not familiar enough with Exchange to know what is even possible. Parent-b is using Lotus and is, as I said, off limits as far as any solution is concerned.
