Domain Email Forwarding to an Exchange Mailbox

Question

I am a long time user of Outlook (desktop). Lately I’ve identified it would be useful to easily access my calendar/contacts/tasks, currently stored locally on my PC, from my (Android) phone.

One option is to use an Exchange mailbox (e.g. MS Office 365 Business Essentials) – this will allow me to continue to use Outlook (desktop), along with various, probably MS, Android apps to access the calendar/contacts/tasks.

However, I currently use a number of email addresses, using domain email redirection, to help manage my email. I can set up one email address to access the mailbox, but can I redirect other addresses to that address/mailbox using domain redirection/forwarding? I can’t currently find anywhere confirming that, and don’t know enough about how domain records affect traffic to be confident about what happens. So what I want to know is:

1. Can I use the Exchange mailbox as the default address for forwarding emails to an invalid address for a domain?
2. Can I use the Exchange mailbox as the target for forwarding all email for a domain?
3. Can I use the Exchange mailbox as the target for forwarding email for a particular address?

Or is there something special about the way Exchange mailboxes work that mean that’s not an option?

Answer 1

I am not familiar with the "domain email redirection/forwarding".

For your questions:

1.Yes, we could configure the forwarding SMTP address via the following command:

Set-Mailbox -ForwardingSmtpAddress

2.&3. It depends on the setting in the sender side, Exchange will simply regard such emails as the inbound emails from Internet and receive them normally.

Answer 2

After some further research, I have been able to answer my own question, at least enough to know I’m not going to use the Exchange option.

1. Using Exchange to forward all emails to another address. (This is often called setting up a ‘catch-all’ address.) Yes, you can do this, but it is not supported by MS, and cannot be easily set up. The steps needed are:
   • Set your Domain to be “Internal Relay” rather than “Authoritative” – this stops Exchange rejecting the emails
   • Create a group containing addresses not to divert including the target address – in my case a single address
   • Setup a divert rule to redirect all mail not addressed to the group to the target address

The success depends on being able to do these things in the particular service (e.g. MS Office 365 Business Essentials, etc) supporting the mail system – some servies do not support setting up divert rules. This scheme was initially documented at http://www.yourithelp.co.uk/office-365-create-catchall-wildcard-address-office-365/ and has since been noted by Microsoft at https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/30462.catch-all-mailbox-office365.aspx. A very clear set of instructions is provided here https://o365info.com/configuring-catch-all-mailbox-in-office-365-part-1-of-2-2/.

2. Using Exchange for all email for a domain. Again I don’t think that Exchange provides an interface to easily do this. As above, some sort of a rule needs to be set up as for forwarding all emails.
3. For a particular mailbox, I don’t think that Exchange can do this apart from setting up a rule of some sort as for forwarding all emails as above.

The redirection facilities provided by cPanel/WHM mail control panel UI appear to be not immediately/easily available for Exchange.