XFOR: How to Control Routing of Subdomains in Internet Mail Service Routing

ID: Q217217

The information in this article applies to:

SUMMARY

In the properties for the Internet Mail Service, there is an option to enable routing. For the Internet Mail Service to still properly receive mail for the local domain, that domain must be entered and marked as <inbound>. The result of this is that all subdomains of the higher-level domain will also be accepted as inbound. Although it is possible to specify that some subdomains be handled differently, this approach can become problematic in the case of a large number of subdomains.


MORE INFORMATION

Assume a domain of sample.microsoft.com with subdomains of dallas.sample.microsoft.com, seattle.sample.microsoft.com, and chicago.sample.microsoft.com. In this organization, mail for chicago.sample.microsoft.com is handled by a separate host. In the Internet Mail Service, the following entries would be present:

sample.microsoft.com <inbound>
chicago.sample.microsoft.com <route to sample.microsoft.com>
This Internet Mail Service server would then accept sample.microsoft.com and dallas.sample.microsoft.com as inbound, redirecting mail for chicago.sample.microsoft.com to the other host. This scheme works fine if there is a small number of subdomains to be rerouted in this manner, but will become unwieldy if there are a large number of subdomains to be rerouted. In this instance, prepending "#" creates an explicit route ignoring subdomains. For sample.microsoft.com, the table would look like:
#sample.microsoft.com <inbound>
dallas.sample.microsoft.com <inbound>
For this example, dallas.sample.microsoft.com would be the only subdomain accepted as inbound; all others would be rerouted using whatever method has been specified on the Connections tab for the Internet Mail Service.

NOTE: Subdomains of dallas.sample.microsoft.com would also be accepted inbound; prepending with the "#" sign would also create this to be explicit if you wanted.

The example companies, organizations, products, people and events depicted herein are fictitious. No association with any real company, organization, product, person or event is intended or should be inferred.

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Version           : winnt:5.0,5.5
Platform          : winnt 
Issue type        : kbinfo

Last Reviewed: March 17, 1999