Topic: email client access over the internet

[macca]

all
i currently have a e-smith 5.5 (upgraded from 5.1.2 today(good or bad?)) with a static ip at our main site.our mx record points to the server all the clients sat behind the sme can send and recieve mails intenally and externally with no problems, using outlook2000 and outlook express 5-6.
heres where the fun starts, we have a few remote sites with 7-8 clients at each sat behind smoothwall firewalls, that perform NAT. 1 machine on each site has a VPN connection to our sme box to allow local file sharing access
(tried getting all the clients to do VPN connections, until i found out it wont work that way ;0(  )
this then leaves the other 6-7 clients at the remote sites wanting to use email, so from each client i can ping our external ip of the sme box, and also the mail.xxxxxx.co.uk of our sme box. so i though okay ill point the remaining machines email clients to mail.xxxxx.co.uk. they can connect and authenticate ok, only problem is that they can only send/recieve emails to and from internal recipients, they can recieve from external address's- whenever they try to send to external recipients the sme box bounces the emails back saying recipient not in my list (thats in outlook express) outlook just gets them returned saing undeliverable

n e ideas?
im baffled, u may of guessed im still learning about sme

is it something to do with local networks?? do i need to point the sme at a secondary mail server?

many many thanks

[rob]

What you are trying to do is called relaying - mail that originates outside your sme server  can't be "relayed" to another external address. SME (and all mail servers) is set up to not allow relaying

Have your remote clients use your sme webmail - 5.5 webmail looks pretty sharp.

or under "other email settings" in the server manager, set pop and imap access to public - set the outlook and outlook express clients to Incoming mail server - http://your_sme_ext_IP (imap) and send there mail using their ISPs mail server.

Hope this helps