Can Exchange 2010 send internal emails to a specific internal recipient through an external MX

emailexchange-2010

Summary

Can you force Exchange 2010 to send internal e-mail to a specific recipient to the server specified in the MX record for its domain, instead of just passing it directly to the internal inbox?

Details

Email for my workplace is first accepted and stored at some third party host, then fetched (with IMAP) by an Exchange server. I'd like to use GMail instead of Exchange, so I've disabled email fetching and configured GMail to fetch it instead.

That works for externally received emails, however, internal email from other Exchange users still comes to my Exchange inbox.

Attempted solutions

  1. An SMTP connector could help, but it appears it only works for complete domains, not specific mailboxes. Even though routing all mail through the external MX server would work, the extra delay would probably be not be accepted.

  2. Applying a personal rule in Outlook helped, but wasn't enough:

    • A "Forward" rule would edit the subject and content ('FW:' and an 'Original message' part with the actual e-mail appearing quoted)
    • A "Redirect" rule was almost perfect, but I couldn't see who the original recipients were. It always appears as though it was sent directly to me, although it could just be a cc.
  3. Our sysadmin won't enable IMAP or POP3 for the Exchange server.

My goal is to keep my Exchange user for the calendar functionality, and being available through groups in the global addresslist (e.g. email sent to "All employees"), but have email handled by GMail.

Best Answer

Sounds like what you need is the "Mail User" functionality - you'd disable the mailbox completely for the user, then configure the account through the "new mail user" workflow, which has you specify an external SMTP address to deliver all mail to.

As far as I'm aware, this should fit your needs - all sender and recipient information should be maintained. See here for details on setting up a recipient in this way; you will need to disassociate the mailbox completely from the user before you do this, so you'll probably want to do some testing to make sure it fits your needs first.

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