I'm trying to lock down the security of the network and found in AD (2003) 'authenticated users' (as a foreign security principle) was a member of 'administrators'. After removing it from the group all seemed fine, users were locked down. The problem is with exchange 2000; certain users stopped getting emails and couldn't receive them, although this was intermittent - sometimes it worked, sometimes not (bounce back errors #4.4.7). It all seemed v random, it wasn't just external emails coming or going or internal emails. I didn't have enough time to investigate fully, I had to put 'authenticated users' back in the 'administrators' group as it was causing to many probs. It seems obvious that it's a permissions issue but I can't find anything vaguely similar to my prob on the net. Would be grateful for some help. Rob

Are you aware of that Exchange 2000 hasn't been supported for 7 Years?Martina Miskovic

Possibly you mucked with the local security policy on the exchange server and denied some default access a long time ago. Do you have another exchange server to compare? See if you can run exchange best practice analyzer and if it mentions anything. James Chong MCITP | EA | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+ Security+, Project+, ITIL msexchangetips.blogspot.com

Possibly you mucked with the local security policy on the exchange server and denied some default access a long time ago. Do you have another exchange server to compare? See if you can run exchange best practice analyzer and if it mentions anything. James Chong MCITP | EA | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+ Security+, Project+, ITIL msexchangetips.blogspot.com