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I'm trying to set up a contact in SBS 2003 Exchange so that an external party can have an internal email address which auto-forwards to them. All the web examples I can find point to a very straight forward method invovling creating contact in the Active Directory Users, then navigating to the 'Exchange General' tab in the properties for that contact. Supposedly one should find a 'Delivery Options' button where a forwarded email address entry field can be found. However there is no such button when I look. Certainly that button exists if I look at the properties of a normal 'User' for the system. But not when dealing with a 'Contact'. Almost every website I look at says it should exist. Any thoughts?

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A contact is an external recipient and as such has no mailbox, therefore you won't find any forwarding options. There are several object types that can be mail enabled or mailbox enabled in Exchange.

A user can be mailbox enabled (meaning they have an email address and a mailbox) or they can be mail enabled (meaning they have an email address and no mailbox).

A Contact can be thought of as a mail enabled object. It is an external recipient that can have an internal email address as well as an external email address. A contact is not a user object and therefore cannot have a mailbox on which to configure forwarding options.

You can create a Contact, give it an internal and an external email address, send an email to either address, or select the Contact from the GAL in order to send an email.

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  • How does that correlate with this: support.microsoft.com/kb/281926
    – Nicholas
    Jun 24, 2010 at 1:50
  • It correlates exactly. You create a user\mailbox, then you create a Contact, then you set the forwarding options on the user\mailbox to forward to the Contact. They mis-stated step 2 in the "How to configure mail forwarding" section. It should read "Right-click the mailbox-enabled user, and then click Properties" as mail enabled users or Contacts do not have mailboxes and can not have forwarding options set.
    – joeqwerty
    Jun 24, 2010 at 1:54
  • Seems a bit excessively round-about to me. But I suppose that's moot. Thanks.
    – Nicholas
    Jun 24, 2010 at 2:13
  • Glad to help...
    – joeqwerty
    Jun 24, 2010 at 2:51

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