Exchange 5.5 Cell Phone Alerts

If your cell phone supports receiving Internet email messages (e.g., 1234567890@messaging.nextel.com), your phone can alert you when problems occur with your Exchange system's Internet mail gateway. In Exchange Server 5.5, you can configure a link monitor to track Internet email round-trip times to determine whether your Internet Mail Service (IMS) is working properly. To determine whether the IMS gateway is sending and receiving Internet email messages in a reasonable amount of time, the link monitor sends a message to a bogus Internet recipient and waits for a nondelivery report (NDR) to arrive. If an NDR arrives within the threshold time that you've specified, you can assume that the link is operating and the IMS gateway is functioning. However, if the link monitor determines that the link is down and you've specified on the link monitor's Notification tab that you want to be notified at your cell phone email address, you won't be able to receive that alert because your system's Internet email isn't functioning.

To overcome this problem, you can install an additional Exchange server that runs the IMS. Make sure this IMS server can send SMTP messages over the Internet. On the Address Space tab of the IMS Properties dialog box, type *@your_cellphone_email_domain (e.g., *@messaging.nextel.com) and enter a Cost of 1. After you configure IMS in this manner, any email destined for a recipient at your_cellphone_email_domain (e.g.,xxxxx@messaging.nextel.com) will use this IMS server and not the production IMS server that isn't functioning. The final step is to create a custom recipient in your Global Address List (GAL) for the cell phone email address and enter this address on the link monitor's Notification tab.

—Siraj Charaniya
siraj.charaniya@lw.com