I have had misleading answers to the problem I am having and I have searched far and wide and just decided to finally bite the bullet in regards to this situation. Currently we have an outside provider hosting our email. We receive email through POP3/SMTP from an outside address. We have an Exchange 2007 server setup but it is being utilized for the internal email/calender/SharePoint functionality. I am new to being an exchange administrator (New position) and am wondering how to set up to host our own mail server while maintaining the .local domain name currently in use by the company. Example: Domain is xyz.local (Exchange 2003 Enterprise) Email is @xyz.com (through another provider) Outside email is routed by POP3 We want to be able to incorporate our AD/Domain into allowing us to manage and receive company email without needing a third party provider. Any help that can be provided with this is much appreciated. I would rather not have to build a new domain due to hardware restrictions, we do currently have a web site and domain name, but no in house MX records have been created as of yet but can be done.

The WINDOWS domain has nothing to do with your SMTP domain. Therefore if the Exchange server is already configured you simply need to add your external email domain as another Accepted Domain, adjust the email address policies to create the email addresses. Check the users have the correct email addresses. Then open port 25, get an A record created pointing to your static IP address, and then change your MX record to point to the A record host. Shortly afterwards you will start to receive email. Thats it. No need to do anything with your Windows domain. Simon.Simon Butler, Exchange MVP. http://blog.sembee.co.uk , http://exbpa.com/

I agree with Sembee. Besides, I recommend you to have a look at the following article: Understanding SMTP and Exchange Server 2003 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996068(EXCHG.65).aspx Regards, Xiu