Exchange won’t email externally

exchangeexchange-2013printing

We've been banging our heads for the last few days trying to figure this one out. Even our Senior Systems Engineer seems to be unable to come up with a decent explanation for this one.

We discovered this issue when our MFPs refused to Scan to Email outside of our company emails. We have the domain (and proper MX record) "@ourdomain.com". Our MFPs can scan and send to those emails through our local Exchange server just fine. Telnet has been tested within the network and we get the same result.

Our OWA can send emails just fine, to any address. Our DNS Gateway is set properly on the MFPs.

We have the proper receive connector's set up to allow the printers and our test desktop to relay emails.

The problem – We cannot send emails to any email but ours outside of using OWA/Outlook. Are we missing something important here?

Ex: Our MFPs can email anemail@ourdomain.com, but not anemail@gmail.com or any other domain.

Best Answer

What you're trying to do is not sending, it's relaying. The MFPs are sending and they are trying to use your Exchange server as an SMTP relay. Exchange used to be an open relay by default, but that is a major security problem so now Exchange servers will not relay any mail by default. Using Outlook or OWA is not relaying because in those cases the Exchange server itself is generating the message.

This page has instructions on how to create an SMTP relay connector for Exchange 2013. Briefly, you create a new receive connector, allow anonymous connections, and (very important) you specify the IP addresses of your MFPs as allowed to send through that connector.

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