Multi-site Exchange2003 internal/external name resolution

I have a customer with 2 sites, both are in the same domain domain.local with a DC+Exchange 2003 on each site. There are mailboxes on both Exchange servers. The sites are connected by vpn using a 3rd party thing I know little about. They each obviously have their own internet connection and reasonably autonomous. Both sites are set up so that mymail.washingtonoffice.com forwards to the washington office's external IP/exchange and mymail.sheffieldsite.com goes to the  sheffield site's ip/exchange.

Either site will let me open OWA, but when it tries to authenticate and the mailbox whose credential I use is stored on the OTHER server I get forwarded. Which would be fine but it forwards my browser to the INTERNAL fqdn of the other server. Internally they are using a .local domain so obviously I cant set up DNS for them!

Is this meant to happen? Is there a way round it? I found the following technet article and the submitter is having precisely the same problem as me but nobody has replied yet. I thought I would ask the real experts :o)

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2174627&SiteID=17


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