Hi All,This might be the wrong place to ask, but i have the following question.I have a hosted exchange 2007 environment. In theoryone of mycustomers might want to send email to one of my other customers, not knowing that they are both in the same Exchange hosted environment. If they do this frequently, one of them mightwant to consider to create a contact. If this contact is tried to be created, an error is thrown stating that the SMTP address is already in use in the Exchange realm. Which of course is true.So is it possible somehow to use the same SMTP address for a user mailbox and also for a contact ? Since my customers are completely seperated, they cannot add users from one another in for instance distribution lists. Of course they have their own GAL.Any ideas on this welcome.BR,Ronald

hi,contacts are created for two reason.1) to authenticate users on the network2) to send message externally foreign mail addressyou can create contact in two way ;first one from Exchange management console (EMCsecond way from cmdlet.and info about Recipient management in exchange server 2007 ;http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/08/22/428740.aspxregards,Mumin CICEK | Exchange - MVP | www.cozumpark.com | www.mumincicek.com

HI,Adding some more line in this thread. As Mumin said we use contacts for the purpose of externally mail delivery and authentication in network so local users easily can pick up forigh email address in GAL with the help of local address space email address.But one thing ! You can not use same email address for mailbox and for contacts in same exchange organization as it will give you error "This email address is already exist" Anil

"But one thing ! You can not use same email address for mailbox and for contacts in same exchange organization as it will give you error "This email address is already exist"Yep, this is the reason I started this thread. Is this period ? Is there no way around this ? Because I run a single hosted Exchange Organization with seperate GALs, it might be possible that two customers want to add one anothers contact information. Company01 trades with company02. In Company01 the sales guy is called salesguy@company01.com. OK, so now in company02 they decide that it would be handy to have this as a contact in their own GAL. So they try to add the Windows contact, but of course this fails.I could get around this by creating a public folder with contacts, create a DL and add a contact in this DL. But then this DL cannot be used in scripts, will not show up in the GAL by default and besides, support for DL will be dropped sooner or later (hate that MS !!! Please rethink this !!).So any ideas ?BR,Ronald

Hi,I understand that your feeling on this issue. Please understand that the users are hosted in the same AD for the company01 and company02 even though they have different email address. If the contact has the same address as the mailbox user, when sending the email to it, Exchangewill query the user from the AD since it is the internal user which located in the AD. In that situation, the same two users will be gotten. That is conflict.To workaround this issue, I suggest we create the contact in the local profile, such as in the Outlook.Thanks for your understanding.Allen

Hi Allen.The point is that I have a provisioning system being operated by the customers themselves. So they can create contacts, mailboxes and so on. I cannot keep track of what they do. So they call me for errors and suddenly I find out that both companies are customers.I know adding them to a local client is an option, but this is not handy if thecontact is used by everyone. Adding to a public folder with contact items and make this an addressbook is also an option, but I thought support for PF will be dropped sooner or later.BR,Ronald

Hi,Yes, that is indeed the problem. For the future development of Public Folder, please refer to the below artilce:http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/02/20/419994.aspxThanksAllen