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Question about alias email address and distribution group

Hello,
I'm running Exchange 2007 and I think I have some redundancy going on that I want to clean up. I have a distribution group called 'Customer Service'. The smtp address associated with it is 'csr@mydomain.com'. I went to add another email address called 'customerservice@mydomain.com' but it came back stating that something else is using it please choose another proxy address. So I found out where it is being used. I have a separate mailbox that I'm using for the customer service emails and sure enough one of the smtp's was customerservice@mydomain.com.
When emails come in does it look at the smtp address of that mailbox or does it look at the distribution group? What I'm thinking is why is there a distribution group called customerservice when the customerservice goes in a mailbox. To me it seems the distribution group doesn't get used because the the customerservice emails that come in go to a mailbox. Safe to get rid of the dist group?
Thank you,
BW

bwinkworth

ASKER

I think I figured it out but I'll wait to see what someone else thinks. My grasp on it is the dist group is used internally to send to the members of that group while the smtp address of 'customerservice@mydomain.com' is used for incoming emails and gets put into the mailbox it's associated with

BW

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Member_2_3654191

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Member_2_3654191

Dist group can also receive mail from outside if not prohibited by smtp connector or somewhere else. Could be that is was meant for internal use by your company, of course.

bwinkworth

ASKER

Yes there are members of the dist group 'Customer Service' but no emails ever come in for csr@mydomain.com. But the group is used internally if someone wants to send to all of the members of that group

Member_2_3654191

Ok, to get back to your question. If you want to use the customerservice@mydomain.com address for the dist group you will need to remove that address from the mailbox first. Of course mail sent from anywhere to that address would then go to the dist group instead of the mailbox.

After removing an smtp address you need to wait up to 15 minutes until it can be reused.

bwinkworth

ASKER

Gotcha. Great thanks for the info

BW