Hi Folks: We have a situation where we need to provide email accounts to non-company personnel. Since all of our personnel have Active Directory Domain Accounts the concern is how to provede the email accounts without adding the non-company people to our Domain. How do you normally handle this situation? Thanks!

We usually expect people to use their own external accounts. At the most, we will add them as a contact so their external address would be in the GAL. If you are going to give them an Exchange account, they have to have an AD account.

You must realize that if you are going to host email account using Exchange 2000 or later you must have an AD account associated with the mailbox. Exchange 2000 and later is entirely dependant on AD. Exchange 5.5 and earlier was a different story. But even if you could create a mailbox without having an AD account how would you link an external account to access that mailbox? Either way someone is going to have to have a mailbox and an account to access that mailbox. If the "non-company" personnel have AD you can create a trust between forests and then link an external associated account with a Exchange AD mailbox in your forest and domain. Check out this article. Exchange 2000 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322890/en-us Exchange 2003 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/278888/en-us You must set the send as permission as well Unless you have loaded the hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/kb/895949/en-us Hope this helps. Thanks