This question addresses the general concept of email forwarding in Exchange 2003. I want to extend his question by asking whether I can allow users (i.e., non-admins) to set up forwarding by themselves. Can this be done in Exchange 2003?
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4 Answers
It's not generally possible from the AD perspective unless you have delegated the appropriate control on your AD objects to the users, given them access to the ADUC or a custom MMC console, yada-yada-yada (Bad idea IMHO).
Users can do it though from within Outlook by setting up a rule.
Provided the default Internet Message Format has "Allow automatic forward" set, a rule can be created in Outlook to automatically redirect (probably preferred instead of forward) mail to an external address. With old clients that rule was client-only, but newer clients can set up that rule to be server side. With Exchange 2007 this can also be set using OWA Premium (unfortunately not OWA Basic), although I don't recall if Exchange 2003 has that functionality (IIRC the OWA supported rules were quite limited).
Beware that with without proper settings, it's quite possible to make a mail loop. An example would be if the destination starts bouncing and that bounce message goes to the mailbox that redirects or forwards all mail indiscriminately rather than excluding bounce messages.
Besides client side rules, the only way is through ADUC, which would not be advisable to give your users access to that. :)
As a side-note, perhaps this is possible in Exchange 2010/OWA where users can change which distribution groups they're in with ease... sounds like a similar feature (though blind forwarding outside the organisation is a security issue imo)
answered Nov 5, 2009 at 0:38
