I came across a minor situation today when setting up a forwarding rule against an Exchange Public folder. Having done this many times in the past, I knew I would get this accomplished in a matter of minutes. So I began by creating the Public Folder, mail enabling it and then when into the properties of the public folder itself to create a rule which would forward the items as they arrive to multiple recipients both internal and external to the organisation.
The forwarding was behaving as expected for internal recipients but none of the external recipients were receiving the emails that were being auto forwarded. Scratching my head, I delved straight into the Exchange Management Console, and launched the Exchange Message Tracking toolbox which showed zero results for emails sent to those external recipients. Scratching my head again, this time for a briefer moment, it clicked to me that this is the first time I had setup auto forwarding for external recipients and was aware of some settings under the Hub Transport Server (Organisation Configuration) that may prevent this. Alas, by default Exchange 2007 prevents “Automatic Forward”, so I checked the box to allow, and the auto forward rule behaved expectedly for external recipients as well!
