Probably a very basic question to those of you who know but is it essential for AD usernames to be identical to the first part of the email address for Exchange 2007?What I mean is if the AD logon name is in the form fbloggs can the email address be fred.bloggs@companyname.com?ta muchly, Brian.

Absolutely. You can have domain\fbloggs and the SMTP address can be anything you want on the left side of the @

OK thanks Andy, I was hoping that was the case as we were not planning on changing all usernames in AD uneccessarily prior to installing EXCH - I think what confused me was I seem to recall on my test serverwhen I enabled Exchange properties for an individual user it created the mailbox for me based on the username (or perhaps my memory is playing tricks on me?).

Brian,I think Andy has already answered your question yet few resources you might want to take a look at to refresh everything about Exchange 2007. http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/11/16/431531.aspxhttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124907.aspxThanks,Milind Naphade | MCTS:M (Exchange 2007 and 2010) | http://www.msexchangegeek.com

Thats sounds correct actually. But you can set the alias to anything you want as well ( as long as its not already taken!) :)

Ah Ok I am getting my head around this now, thanks for the links. I am assuming then that I also do not need to match the DNS name with my external SNMP domain name i.e. AD DNS name "internal.my-company.com"as an example but if I wanted to drop the hyphen for external email addy's then forwarding to anything I want then I can do that no probs without complicating things?

Your SMTP domains can be anything ( as long as they are RFC compliant) thatyou are authorative for, so no absolute need to match AD domain names and SMTP domain names. ( you can support multiple proxy smtp address spaces)

Many thanks both!

Glad to help :-)Milind Naphade | MCTS:M (Exchange 2007 and 2010) | http://www.msexchangegeek.com