CRM 4.0 E-Mail Router for hosted Exchange

I have a client who uses a hosted Exchange for their email system (also hosted AD) and my client uses CRM 4.0 On-Premise edition. So the CRM E-Mail Router solution is:

• Outgoing: local SMTP service, use local system account

• Incoming: hosted Exchange, use a service account which can access the remote Exchange mailbox

• Both Outgoing and Incoming are configured to use Email Router

When test the connection, the outgoing STMP works fine, however, the incoming Exchange get the following error:
"Incoming Status: Failure - The remote Microsoft Exchange e-mail server returned the error "(404) Not Found". This user or queue does not have a mailbox. Create a mailbox and try again. The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found. "

It is strange because I'm sure the user has mailbox! Thanks for Tony Iadarola who is a senior engineer works for the hosting company , after analyzing the Exchange server logs, he pointed out that the CRM E-Mail router service try to query the mailbox by using the 'half' SMTP address!( which is not recommend, MS recommend either SamAccount or Legacy DN, or mailbox GUID is used)

e.g.: In our case, we have a test user in CRM, the user's SamAccount name is: TU341-NBG125, SMTP mailbox: TUser@domain.com which is the user's primary email address in CRM. The CRM E-Mail Router service should be making a request to Exchange mail server for the Test users mailbox using http://ExchangeMailServer/Exchange/TU341-NBG125 instead it is using http://ExchangeMailServer/Exchange/TUser

If I change the user's primary email address to TU341-NBG125@domain.com, the problem will disappear! However the email address doesn't mean anything to customers, so I can't change the email address.

Finally I found a workaround: edit ..\Microsoft CRM Email\Service\Microsoft.Crm.Tools.EmailAgent.xml
Search the test user section(within the tag: <ProviderConfiguration>), edit it's <EmailAddress> tag, change the email address from TUser@domain.com to TU341-NBG125@domain.com, then save the xml file, modify it's property to Read-Only, restart the CRM E-mail Router Service.(You have to make the file read-only first, otherwise the service will re-write the <EmailAddress> tag by using the user's primary email address)

The problem is solved, all users still use their normal email address, and the CRM E-Mail Router is able to create an Email activity for incoming emails with correct email address. However I think the CRM E-mail Router should be improved by query mailbox via SAM, instead of using SMTP address which may not unique for a hosted environment.



16/07/2008, add to my post: the service account needs to have permission to access 'Root' and 'Inbox' folder of user's mailbox. e.g. if the service account has such permission, it can find user's mailbox by using the 'half' SMTP address (http://ExchangeMailServer/Exchange/TUser ). However it's might be a problem for a hosted company who doesn't want to grand the permission for the service account.