Email Appliance and Office 365

Hi BradC,

I may be able to set you off in the correct direction, however I'd need more information. I can make some presumptions based on my encounters with similar service offerings, however they may be completely incorrect :)

Right now, I'm guessing that the MX record for your company domain is pointing to some IP addresses at MS. This means that the Internet would send mail traffic to MS's servers and your internal clients would then connect to possibly the same IP or name to get or send their messages. Again, just completely guessing.

If this is the case, then I think there are two or more options for you:

1. You change your MX record to point to your appliance, which you then configure to send all it's e-mail  (that passes scanning and filtering) to MS's servers. The logical path would look like this:

Sender -> Sender's SMTP system -> Internet -> Your email appliance -> MS servers <- Internal clients

This would allow all your incoming SMTP traffic to be scanned by the appliance, then sent to MS for further processing at which point your clients could then receive their messages.

2. You some how configure office365 to relay all messages for your domain to your appliance. This would logically look like:

Sender - > Sender's SMTP system -> Internet - MS Systems -> Your email appliance -> ??? <- Internal clients

I put the ?'s there because I have only ever used the software appliance. It seems like there is not way to actually store messages on the device for client access. If this is true then the ?s would need to be some kind of Mail storage system: POP, IMAP or MS Exchange. If you're going to go this route, it seems redundant to have either Office365 or a local Exchange system since you're now duplicating efforts and ony using Office365 as an expensive Antivirus solution.

If the email appliance can store messages and act as a connection point for Mail User Agents, then the ?s can be removed and your messages get stored there.

Clear as mud?

Erric

Hi BradC,

I may be able to set you off in the correct direction, however I'd need more information. I can make some presumptions based on my encounters with similar service offerings, however they may be completely incorrect :)

Right now, I'm guessing that the MX record for your company domain is pointing to some IP addresses at MS. This means that the Internet would send mail traffic to MS's servers and your internal clients would then connect to possibly the same IP or name to get or send their messages. Again, just completely guessing.

If this is the case, then I think there are two or more options for you:

1. You change your MX record to point to your appliance, which you then configure to send all it's e-mail  (that passes scanning and filtering) to MS's servers. The logical path would look like this:

Sender -> Sender's SMTP system -> Internet -> Your email appliance -> MS servers <- Internal clients

This would allow all your incoming SMTP traffic to be scanned by the appliance, then sent to MS for further processing at which point your clients could then receive their messages.

2. You some how configure office365 to relay all messages for your domain to your appliance. This would logically look like:

Sender - > Sender's SMTP system -> Internet - MS Systems -> Your email appliance -> ??? <- Internal clients

I put the ?'s there because I have only ever used the software appliance. It seems like there is not way to actually store messages on the device for client access. If this is true then the ?s would need to be some kind of Mail storage system: POP, IMAP or MS Exchange. If you're going to go this route, it seems redundant to have either Office365 or a local Exchange system since you're now duplicating efforts and ony using Office365 as an expensive Antivirus solution.

If the email appliance can store messages and act as a connection point for Mail User Agents, then the ?s can be removed and your messages get stored there.

Clear as mud?

Erric