Exchange 2K Rules

You don't specify whether your co-worker set it up to page you or to page himself, or how many times you've tried to set it up on his server, so we'll go from the general to the specific here...

You say the rule forwards to an outlook contact. Does that contact exist on the 2nd server, or can the second server see it on the first?

If the contact exists in both places, is the spelling correct? (I've seen countless hours wasted in troubleshooting only to find a simple typo).

Is the rule identical line-by-line on both servers? Should it be, or does it need to be modified to the settings of the second server?

Does your counterpart's pager receive messages generated by your server if you add his address in the forwarding line on yours? Are you sure his device works? Can the rule on his setup send messages to any other source?

Are the messages the rule is scanning for the same, or is the wording slightly different, causing the pattern match to fail?

Anyway, these would be the first questions I would ask... Good luck to you!

Tim

If you can log into his server and look at your mailbox, authentication is not the issue. Presumably you were logged in to his server when you created the rule, so it is attached to your mail box there.

This is a list of things to check, including some stuff that often gets overlooked:

a) Log on to his server, go to the rules wizard, and make sure that the rule is active. (Wizard sometimes inactivates a rule if it does not have enough storage.)

b) While you are there, check that it says what you think it says.

c) Make sure the contact it points to is in your mailbox on that server. Open the contact and make sure its address is correct. (Manually send a message to it to be sure.)

d) Verify what happens when a target email goes to the problem server. Is another rule getting the message before your rule? (One thing you can do to make absolutely sure is to temporarily add a clause to your rule which copies the message to another folder in the mailbox. If the copy does not show up, your rule did not fire.)

e) Verify that a message to the email name you are using on that server actually routes to that server from outside. The indicator for this is that if you send mail from on the server it works, but if it comes from outside it vanishes. If you see all the mail in the mailbox, this is not an issue.

f) While you say the rule is identical, could you be looking for terms linked by "AND" rather than "OR" on this server?

Good luck.

In Exchange 5.5, you needed to modify the Internet Mail Service properties to allow OutOfOffice replies as well as other automatic replies/forwarding to the internet, all of which was disabled by default. I haven't worked much with Exchange 2000 yet, but I beleive that you need to configure the Global Settings node in System Manager to define allowed types of messages (OutOfOffice, AutoReply, AutoForward, etc) that can be sent to each external domain.

Good luck and please post your resolution as a comment if you can.

-Ewing

I think you may have answered this yourself.

The trick here is where the contact was made.
Is it on the local machine or in the GAB.

If you made the contact on the client side contact list and it has the same name as the one in the global adress book. Exchange will go nutty and will reject the message.
This is because exchange goes by a weird system of IDS, and it gives permissions based on those IDS. If you present an ID with the incorrect permissions, you get a no go on the send.I have gone thru this alot with my users when we switched over to exchange. They tried to send to a user listed in the GAB using their old adress book. Of course it wouldnt' work.

I also have my nextel e-mail pager account set up similar to you.

Basically what I did was, make a custom receipient with your nextel pgr address.
phonenumber@page.nextel.net.

Now you can do the next part one of two ways.
You can either setup an distribution list with something like pageme@domain.com and add the nextel adress to it's membership. (that way you have a nice pretty alias for people to select from the GAB)

Or you can create/add the address to your custom reciepient adress list, but set the reply smtp as the nextel adress. Anytime someone sends to the alias, it will automatically forward to the smtp adress.

I suggest the first one so that you can set up your rules easily using an alias.

Then go back to the clients machine that you are having problems with. Delete the rule, and set it back up, this time choosing the correct alias from the GAB. This should clear up your problem.