Cross forest in Exchange - Nero Blanco IT Migration Specialists

Cross forest in Exchange - Nero Blanco IT Migration Specialists">

Twan van Beers
03 October, 2014

How to open a mailbox cross forest in Exchange

We often migrate users between Exchange organisations/forests, or need to add coexistence between two or more Exchange organisations and forests. The basic set up for coexistence includes the following:

Network coexistence
DNS coexistence
AD Trust
Autodiscover coexistence
Synchronisation of GAL objects
Accepted Domains
Remote Domains
Mail Routing
Availability Address Spaces

In this case we’re only looking at how to get mailboxes to open cross organisation, so we will assume that the above is in place already. This means that the GALs are in sync, meaning the mailbox that needs to be accessed is available as an MEU in the Exchange organisation that is hosting the user who wants to access it as an additional mailbox.

In order to be able to open mailboxes cross organisation you need to ensure

that the MEU has msExchRecipientDisplayType set to -1073741818. This is to ensure that the mailbox user can pick the MEU to open their mailbox
that the Mailbox has the legacyExchangeDNs of each MEU as an x500 proxyAddresses entry. This is to ensure that Outlook can find the mailbox in the target environment using the MEU from the source LEDN
that the SendAs right is applied on the MEU, if you need SendAs to work cross organisation. This is because it is the originating Exchange organisation evaluates if send as is allowed

We have done this configuration many times for customers and it works seamlessly. The user has no idea that the additional mailbox or profile is from a totally different Exchange organisation.

Twan van Beers

Twan is a senior consultant with over 30 years of experience. He has a wide range of skills including Messaging, Active Directory, SQL, Networking and Firewalls. Twan loves to write scripts and get deep and dirty into debugging code, in order to understand and resolve the most complex of problems.