MS Exchange 2007 Installation and Configuration (Part 3 of 3)
In the second part I discussed the steps I made for making my exchange mail server receive emails from external mail servers. Here I will discuss how to make your exchange server send emails to external mail servers
- Ask your ISP to make a reverse lookup PTR to point to our domain from the real IP in order to be able to send emails to other mail servers since otherwise your emails will be black listed and rejected
- you could check if the reverse look up pointer is configured using the following procedures:
- Open the command prompt
- ping -a [your public ip address here]
- You the domain retrieved from the reverse lookup must match your domain
- you could check if the reverse look up pointer is configured using the following procedures:
- You will need also to remove your self from any public spam servers you could check your IP in the following sites
- For some mail servers to receive emails from your server you may need to configure an SPF record you could visit the below site to help you configure it
After the first step you probably be sending externally to most of the mail servers including gmail however some others will require rest of the steps Hotmail unfortunatly sometimes won’t be receiving emails from your side yet. you will need then to contact the hotmail staff stating that you want to unblock your IP and domain and that this is causing you a big problem not being able to reach your clients etc.
Finally hope that these 3 posts has been helpful for you to have your Exchange Server up and running.
MS Exchange 2007 Installation and Configuration (Part 2 of 3)
In the first part I discussed the installation and the configuration of the Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 for working internally this part I will discuss the steps I made for making my mail server receive emails from external mail servers.
- Configure your public domain to point to your Real IP, while making your router forward the requests to your domain controller machine.
- For Receiving External Emails You should give anonymous permission on the receiver connector from PermissionGroups Tab in the receiver properties
- Also port 25 and 587 should be configured from the router to be redirected to the mail server ip
- Now check if your mail server configured successfully using MXToolbox website (http://www.mxtoolbox.com/index.aspx)
An interesting problem I found here which is related to my personal firewall is that some mail servers timeout their requests (my firewall is zywall 5.0)
There were 2 solutions I found for it the first one was
- downgrading to version – Version 4.03(XD.1)C0 – and problem seems to be solved
- A Set of commands to execute on your firewall
- telnet to the ZyWALL, menu 24, option 8 (de CLI).
- Give the commando: “sys tos timeout tcpsyn “.
- the default is 270, change this to 540 or higher.. (so -> ’sys tos timeout tcpsyn 540′)
Next in the last part I will be talking about sending emails to external mail servers like (gmail,hotmail, etc)
MS Exchange 2007 Installation and Configuration (Part 1 of 3)
This is my first blog post, although normally I will be posting on development software engineering stuff 
I thought of making my first blog post different, anyways I was trying to install and configure Microsoft Exchange 2007. I Thought of sharing the steps I made for installing and configuring the exchange server 2007 starting from after the windows 2003 installation.
- Install IIS (But Don’t Include SMTP and NNTP)
Exhange Server adds its own SMTP so installing the SMTP in the IIS would result in a conflict and your exchange server won’t be functioning.
- Install The update and fixes from the windows live update on the Internet (Note this is a recursive process I mean here check for updates until there is no others)
- Install .Net Framework 2.0 (This step and the next one may have been done from the updates if you selected the .net frameworks nevertheless if you have them on your machine and don’t want to download them then install them separately)
- Install .Net Framework 3.0
- Install Power shell 1.0
- Install and configure the Domain DNS (Administration Panel -> Configure Your Server Wizard)
- Install and configure the Active Directory Domain Controller(Administration Panel -> Configure Your Server Wizard)
- Switch the Active Directory Domain Controller to Windows 2000 Native Mode
- Open Active Directory users and computers
- Right Click the domain then select Raise Domain Functional Level
- Switch the domain controller to Windows 2000 Native Mode
- Edit the DNS Configuration Administrative Tools -> DNS (Make sure the DNS have an (A) Record and an (MX) Record for the exchange server domain)
- Go inside the directory that has the installation files then execute the below commands one after the other.
- setup.com /ps (makes exchange server setup prepares the schema)
- setup.com /preparead /organizationname:ramymostafa (of course change the ramymostafa
first this command will make the exchange server setup prepare the active directory)
- Start the setup.exe installation file
- Select the typical exchange server installation
- Make sure you have 4GB (512 in case of Exchange Server 2007 with Service Pack1) of free space on your hard disk
- otherwise disable the exchange check using these steps
- Open the EdgeTransport.exe.config file from \Exchange Server\bin directory using notepad
- Add the following key+value pair:
<add key=”EnableResourceMonitoring” value=”false” />
- Save file
- Restart Microsoft Exchange Transport Service (MSExchangeTransport)
- Configure the Sender Connector From Exchange Management Organization Hub Transport Role
Now your exchange server should work to send and receive emails internally perfectly. Next part I will discuss how you could receive emails from external mail servers