Changing email domains

I've been looking into domain management recently, specifically for adding a second mail domain to an Exchange 2003 server. In this particular example, I already have a working environment composed of the following;

• 2 x Windows Server 2003 AD domain controllers


• 1 x Exchange Server 2003 member server configured to route all email to a smarthost


• Firewalls configured to route outbound email to Internet based antivirus and antispam service


• Firewalls configured to only accept inbound email from Internet mail scanning service

So any emails going to user@domain1.com pass through to the mail scanning service, and if it passes the various antivirus and antispam rules, is then passed to the Exchange server.

The task now is to allocate a second email address to each user to receive email on user@domain2.com, and here are the steps I've had to take;

• Contact the mail scanning service to set up an account for domain2.com


• Contact the ISP to allow domain2.com messages into our network


• Configure the MX records at domain2.com to route mail to the mail scanning service

There could possibly be another couple of steps, but in my case the mail scanning service has take care of this;

• Configure the firewalls to only accept inbound email from the mail scanning service


• Configure SMTP virtual server on Exchange to route outbound mail to the smarthost provided by the mail scanning service

Right now I'm receiving emails to user@domain1.com and user@domain2.com. In the coming days I'm going to set my primary email address to user@domain2.com and check that outbound mail is working correctly.

The final step will be to switch all users to have domain2.com as their primary address.