I'm having some problems setting up an Exchange server, and I think it's because I have my DNS server set up incorrectly. I have an A record set up for mydomain.com, and then a CNAME record set up for mail.mydomain.com. When I do an nslookup on mail.mydomain.com, I get the correct (local) IP of 192.168.0.1, however when I try to ping mail.mydomain.com, it doesn't work because it's trying to ping the global IP of the server. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Any ideas? From a client computer, all of the emails I try to send to another local user get bounced back with this error: #5.1.8 smtp;553 5.1.8 <swieser@mydomain.com>... Domain of sender address user@servername.local does not exist> Thanks in advance, Scott

P.S. The MX record for mydomain.com points to mail.mydomain.com

Why are you using a CNAME record? "#5.1.8 smtp;553 5.1.8 <swieser@mydomain.com>... Domain of sender address user@servername.local does not exist>" Your recipient policies then don't have mydomain.com in them to stamp your user accounts with that address... "Enough, enough bowing down to disillusion! Hats off & applause to rogues & evolution! The ripple effect is too good not to mention. If you’re not affected, you’re not paying attention!"

I'm using a CNAME record because I have no idea what I'm doing. I changed the CNAME record to an A record. I also changed the recipient policies to have mydomain.com instead of myserver.local, and that completely fixed the problem. Thanks a lot!

As a precaution, I would highly recommend you run dcdiag to check for DNS issues that could be related to AD. Doesn't hurt or cost anything, and you could avert a potential problem down the road. Glad I could help you otherwise! "Enough, enough bowing down to disillusion! Hats off & applause to rogues & evolution! The ripple effect is too good not to mention. If you’re not affected, you’re not paying attention!"