Exchange/Email question?

preecypreecy Member Posts: 66 ■■□□□□□□□□
I'm currently going through the 70-284 (Exchange 2003) Testout and CBT Nugget training material however I'm struggling to understand a particular area...

Let say we have an organisation (named: Company X) which has two offices in different geographical locations (one in London and another in New York). For arguements sake its a 2003 single AD Domain with user accounts and mailboxes at both locations (ie: there is a DC and exchange server at each office). Users at both offices have an email address of 'username@companyx.com'.
Let say a user named John works at the London office, therefore his user account and mailbox is on the London servers. If someone was to email John from outside of the organisation (ie: from an external email account suchas yahoo or msn) where does the email get deliverd too, London or New York or either?

Obvioulsy the email needs to be routed to the London servers but how does an email coming from outside of the organisation know which location it should go too seen as users from both offices share the same external domain name '@companyx.com'?

My thoughts would be to create an mx record with a lower priority/costs for the office which has the largest number users/mailboxes therefore most emails would be routed to that office. When an email hits this office which is ment for a user at the other office would it be rerouted by the exchange server? This is just my wild guess... please correct me!

Also, without changing the email addresses to: @companyx.co.uk, @uk.companyx.com, @child.companyx.com, etc) how would you setup this senario for best practice. Would it be a frontend/backend server situation?

Sorry if my example doesnt make much sense... as you can see I'm struggling with 70-284 and was wanting to get it out the way so i can consentrat on my last couple of core exams.

Thanks in advance ;)
next up SharePoint... what's that all about!

Comments

  • preecypreecy Member Posts: 66 ■■□□□□□□□□
    also, anyone know where i can get a trial download of exchange 2003. MS seems to have removed it from there site since the release of exchange 2007.
    next up SharePoint... what's that all about!
  • Gabe7055Gabe7055 Member Posts: 158
    External email will go to wherever your MX record for that domain tells it to too. So for example let's say you have a front end server either out in your DMZ (bad idea) or published thru ISA. When email comes from the outside world to the front end server, the front end server talks to the back end servers to find out which server hosts the mailbox in question. When a response comes back from the London server the front end server sends the message to the London back end server.

    Of course there are ton of possibile situations where this might be a little different. Say if you have a bridgehead or a smart host but that is the general idea.
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