dr_dudd
asked on
Problem adding AD contacts to GAL in Exchange 2003
I have a small (but growing) number of employees on the road who only have a company POP3 e-mail service. I want to add these into the GAL so that local staff can e-mail them without having to refer to some 'external' list.
I have added the contacts in a new OU called 'External Staff' in AD Users and Computers, and specified their e-mail address.
I have created a new GAL under 'All Global Address Lists' called 'External Staff'. If I add the filter all 'Users, Contacts and Groups' it works but gives me heaps of internal stuff along with the contacts that I want. If I use the 'Advanced' option and select only users with an e-mail address ending in the external domain name then click 'Preview' it correctly selects only the external staff, but when I go to a client and check these are not added to the GAL. If I check on a client when I have the filter for all 'Users, Contacts and Groups' I can see all the crud as well as the external contacts in the GAL.
A second problem is, that if I try to send an e-mail to one of these external contacts selected from the GAL containing them and all the crud entries, it shows the name in the Outlook 'To' box and underlines it, but when I send the message I get an e-mail back saying that the server could not find the e-mail address. If I click on the contact name in the 'To' box and look at properties all the e-mail addresses are blank. Yet the AD record for the contact correctly has the e-mail address. Even weirder - if I hover to the left of the contact name an arrow appears allowing me to click to see a drop down menu, one of the menu items is 'send to' followed by the contact name and the CORRECT e-mail address!
For information the internal domain is company.local but everyone - internal and external - has an e-mail address @company.com - Exchange is non-authoratative for this domain but authoratative for comnpant.local.
As this is really two related questions I will split the points if required. I think this is extremely difficult - I hope someone proves me wrong!
Cheers.
I have added the contacts in a new OU called 'External Staff' in AD Users and Computers, and specified their e-mail address.
I have created a new GAL under 'All Global Address Lists' called 'External Staff'. If I add the filter all 'Users, Contacts and Groups' it works but gives me heaps of internal stuff along with the contacts that I want. If I use the 'Advanced' option and select only users with an e-mail address ending in the external domain name then click 'Preview' it correctly selects only the external staff, but when I go to a client and check these are not added to the GAL. If I check on a client when I have the filter for all 'Users, Contacts and Groups' I can see all the crud as well as the external contacts in the GAL.
A second problem is, that if I try to send an e-mail to one of these external contacts selected from the GAL containing them and all the crud entries, it shows the name in the Outlook 'To' box and underlines it, but when I send the message I get an e-mail back saying that the server could not find the e-mail address. If I click on the contact name in the 'To' box and look at properties all the e-mail addresses are blank. Yet the AD record for the contact correctly has the e-mail address. Even weirder - if I hover to the left of the contact name an arrow appears allowing me to click to see a drop down menu, one of the menu items is 'send to' followed by the contact name and the CORRECT e-mail address!
For information the internal domain is company.local but everyone - internal and external - has an e-mail address @company.com - Exchange is non-authoratative for this domain but authoratative for comnpant.local.
As this is really two related questions I will split the points if required. I think this is extremely difficult - I hope someone proves me wrong!
Cheers.
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ASKER
As Simon suggested I dumped the second GAL and just went back to using the one. The specific problem was that when creating the AD contact I was not giving it an Exchange E-Mail address because I mistakenly assumed this would create a whole Exchange mailbox on the server - which is not what I wanted. By adding the contact and giving them the exchange e-mail address and then adding their external address as an SMTP entry it now all works fine.
Thanks for your help Simon.
Thanks for your help Simon.
ASKER
I created the second GAL because I didn't want to risk mucking up the default one! Also it makes the rule of selecting just the external addresses easier (in theory - because it obviously doesn't quite work). I turned cached mode off for clients when they were first set up.
Exchange correctly routes unresolved addresses within the company.com domain - I have had two members of staff working this way for months - I just wanted to use the GAL after the recent explosion in remote workers.
If I use the filter for all 'Users, Contacts and Groups', in the 'External Staff' GAL then run the update recipients services, the exit from Outlook and start it again the GAL shows the default GAL plus all the extra users, contacts and groups. So that works. But, when I add a filter for just the external contacts that I want (not all the built in groups and users) the 'Preview' works but the additional users don't appear in the client's view of the GAL.