I have a client who had been hosting their own email server and was using exchange server on their 2003 small business server and various versions of Outlook on their workstations. I took out their mail server and am hosting it through a different company now, and added it as a new IMAP account to each users outlook. It seem Exchange server still has some pull over outlook. Sometimes sent mail ends up in the old Exchange Server account, although when an email is sent, it says it is sending it through the SMTP of the new IMAP account.. When Outlook opens, it default opens to the old exchange account and will not default to the new IMAP account. The client also has MASSIVE amounts of old email's saved under the exchange account, sometimes under MANY different folders, subfolder, etc of the old exchange server account. The client says that this is their record keeping, that each user is required to retain ALL their old emails. There are 10's of thousands of them per user. Any help or suggestions would be most appreciative...

That is the behaviour I would expect, particularly with SBS. SBS configures Outlook to use it as the email account and will "correct" Outlook. Email will be sent through Exchange, particularly if Exchange can match the email address to another user on the Exchange server. When it comes to SBS system in particular, I usually tell people you have two choices. 1. Remove Exchange from the SBS server completely. 2. Use Exchange for everything. Mixing the accounts, using Exchange for an archive only, for shared calendars etc will never work reliably, because you are going against how SBS specifically was designed to operate. Simon.Simon Butler, Exchange MVP Blog | Exchange Resources | In the UK? Hire Me.

Simon, Thank you SO MUCH for responding and with quality info. If I simply uninstall Exchange Server from SBS (assuming SBS will let me) how will that affect each users outlook? Each user has (seriously) gigabytes of old email stored under the exchange account locally. They are also using several different versions of Outlook, one is on 2002, most are on 2003, some are on 2007 and one is on 2010. I have tried to get them to get rid of SBS and put in a regular Windows 2008 server but they are resistant to it at the moment. Additionally, most of the users do not have a standard PST file under the local app/ms/outlook folder path. Several have the OST files, and there are some with extensions I never saw before. Almost all of them have many multiples of OST or in some cases PST or if memory servers NST and other files under the local app/ms/outlook folder. I am not sure how to bring it all under control, if you know what I mean. I could copy each users old email to the new IMAP server, but that would take HOURS of work and really isnt what they are paying for via the new mail host. But their old email within outlook under exchange is a mess. ANY more advice would be most welcome. THANKS!

The Outlook content will become orphaned if you remove Exchange. The OST belongs to the user profile and cannot be easily moved. If you want to get rid of Exchange, then you could export the mailboxes to a PST file, but then you have the problem of backup, as a PST file on a network share is not supported and that makes backing up those files a pig. Plus PST files get corrupted as if it was a design feature, making them completely unreliable. Your best option might be to look at something like GFI Mail Archiver to store the old email in. You can import everything, and remove Exchange. How the clients will react to Exchange going away I wouldn't know. As an Exchange MVP removing Exchange in favour of something that isn't Exchange isn't something I do. Simon.Simon Butler, Exchange MVP Blog | Exchange Resources | In the UK? Hire Me.

This is a company with 10 email accounts, barely 16 people working there and no IT person whatsoever and all they do is complain about spending money on IT and have no consistency anywhere, using XP vista 7 or whatever as OS, 5 different Office versions, people on or off the domain, they dont care, and no care about their passwords either. Exchange and a locally hosted email server is inappropriate for them, even though they were sold it by some overzealous IT consultant who cant think any other way. But now Im in there and setting them up sanely but they are entrenched with SBS and exchange and it is not easy to break from esp since they wont spend barely any money.