Incoming mail is addressed to the Postmaster

Help,

We have just intstalled a new 2003 SBS box. No probs at all except that when recieving mail through Exchange all the mail is addressed to the postmaster which in turn goes to the Administrators mailbox. If we dowload the mail straight into Outlook from the web all the correct addresses are maintained. It is when Exhange downloads them, using POP3, that they are all addressed to postmaster.....

Anybody any ideas....???

Thanks

 

I haven't poked around in 2003 much but in the pop3 connector you will have to assighn each ISP E mail to a user account in the domain.

 

Exchange is not a very good mail server when working with a POP3 mail feed. It wasn't designed to work with an incoming POP3 mail feed and it has never worked too well with it. Outlook on the other hand is a very good POP3 mail client and can deal with the various ways ISP arrange POP mail boxes. Why the MS team who create the Outlook code, can't get together with the Exchange team that create the POP3 connector code has always been a fustrating question.

To explain what is happening you need to understand how POP3 works.

POP3 is a system designed for a single user to grab the mail from a single mail box. An e-mail address has the form <mailbox>@<domain>. So in a bog standard mail server supporting "domain.com ", e-mail to john@domain.com goes into one mailbox, and mail to sarah@domain.com goes into another mailbox. To grab both e-mails via POP3, you would have to run one session to grab the mail from the "john" mailbox, and another session to grab the mail from the "sarah" mailbox.

For an ISP to support your domain via POP3 they would have to maintain a seperate mailbox for each of your e-mail addresses. Some do this (ISP accounts where you pay for a given number of mailboxes).

However there is a simpler solution. The ISP can forward all mail sent to your domain to a single mailbox. This is what a lot of the cheaper ISP do.

But it is this that causes the problem, as you end up with two "To" addresses in the e-mail header (For example an original "To:" field and a second "Delivered-To:" field) One address being the address the sender sent it to (e.g. john@domain.com) and one the address the ISP has forwarded the e-mail to (e.g. postmaster@ISPUSER.net).

Exchange is not clever enough to work out which "To" address to work with and defaults to the later address. The single POP3 mailbox in which your ISP is putting your domain mail. Outlook is clever enough to realise that it needs to work with the original To address.

You have four alternatives:

1. If you want to stick with Exchange, the best option is to change the mail feed to an SMTP mail feed.
2. If you want to stick with this ISP and their POP3 mail server, use a alternative mail server to Exchange.
3. If you want to stick with Exchange and a POP3 feed try a different ISP. They don't all use the same header fields and some combinations don't cause a problem for Exchange.
4. You may be able to find a third part POP3 feed utility that will pass the e-mails to Exchange in a format that Exchange can handle properly. For example Mailgate's POPWeasel

In outlook open an e-mail and select "Options" from the "View" menu. You will then see the e-mail header. From this you should be able to see the level of complexity that can appear in e-mail headers, and the difficulty Exchange can have in deciding which "To" field to use.

 

Reggie,
I think you may have missed the fact that he has an SBS box which will go out to a pop3 account hosted by an ISP, retrieve mail from that account (to: doesnt matter) and deliver it straight to a configured Exchange users box.
Only down side is it wont hit the ISP any more often than 15 min because MS has not figured out what to do if the previous session wasn't finished.

But, if you dont want to play with the POP3 connector there is always This

 

No, I have not missed the point. I've seen a number of instances where the SBS POP3 mail connector has problems with routing the right mail to the right address. It all depends how the ISP is routing the domain mail into the single POP3 mail box that Exchange is pulling the mail from.

The connector works fine for some ISPs, but not all. The symptoms being described are typical of those seen when the connector doesn't work well with a particular ISP's mail setup.

However, I do agree with your earlier point. Another possible cause is the e-mail address assignment on the individual mailboxes. However, if this was the problem I would expect catsystems to have noted in the original posting that the messages being received by the Administrator account were marked "Address unknown ".

I'd go 50:50 as to which of us is right. Either the system is routing the mail to the wrong mailbox, in which case I am more likely to be right; or the system is having problems locating the correct mailbox, in which case you are more likely right.

Looks like we'll have to wait for catsystems to report!