Topic: Branch or Franchise setup

[Leon]

Let's start with some asuumptions in this case scenario.

Company A has a domain called eg. domaina.com.
Head Office has a pop3 server and permanent internet connectivity.

Let's assume I have the following users at Head Office
user1@domaina.com
user2@domaina.com
user3@domaina.com

Company A has 20 franchises countrywide - all on dial-up connections
Mail for everybody (including branches) gets sent to Head Office.

Let's assume the following users are located at Branch 1
branch1user1@domaina.com
branch1user2@domaina.com

Let's assume the following users are located at Branch 2
branch2user1@domaina.com
branch2users2@domaina.com

Installing a SME server at a branch with multipop add-on works perfectly collecting mail.

The problem comes when a branch 1 try to mail branch 2 or someone at Head Office.

As the domain is the same for Head Office and all the Branches the SME server at branch 1 and branch 2 think mail for domaina.com is local and will not deliver.

I know one solution is to set SMTP on mail clients to pop3 server at Head Office but that means all mail - even if users are at same branch will go through to Head Office first and the brach managers complain about costs for dialups.

Another solution I've thought of, but have not tried yet is to set the domain on SME Server1 to branch1.domaina.com and branch2.domaina.com on the next SME server. Hence the SME server does not treat the mail for domaina.com as local

How will this influence local mail delivery and sent mail addresses??

Any other ideas on solutions for this???

[Ken]

The beauty of domains are that you can have subdomains

literally go to http://www.mydomain.com where you can set up as many sub domains as you want for free, though they do like you to renew your domain through them.

So you can have

john@losangeles.yournamedomain.com
john@newyork.yournamedomain.com

and 1000 others

these can be redirected to whereever you want. If you choose you could have a smeserver at each branch. Or you can re-direct to hotmail if so desired.

Ken

[Jason]

i have just been through a very similar situation. i will explain my situation and see if it is similar to yours and i will show you how i solved it. Sorry if i mis some letters in my typing my batteris on my keyboard are nearly dead. I had a company that has three sub branches and all work under domain.com we are changing all there offices up and down the coast to sme. They currently run a exchange server in two office and a linux box in the other. I was chaning the exchang server over to sme. The domain.com is hosted by an isp that collects all there mail at the isp, the isp has a list of all the users at each of the domains when an email comes in it sorts it to there respective postmaster accounts ie town1.domain.com town2.domain.com town3.domain.com i was told that they do this just via a series of forwards per user to the appropriate postmaster i would assume that your head office has the same setup. I set up the sme with the primary domain of town1.domain.com once set up i also set up a virtual domain of ther domain.com. I did this so the emails would sort correctly otherwise when the emails came in they just went to the admin account because they were addressed to domain.com and the server said hey i am town.domain.com nobody here by this address. Anyway after creating the sub domain of domain.com i could no longer send to anybody in the other offices. So what i did was in the virtual domainn i created a host entry town2.domain.com and town3.domain.com and forwarded the ip back to the isp for sorting. Then i created all the users in the other offices in the server manager and when it asks to deliver mail locally or forward to address i said forward to address name@town2.domain.com or name@town3.domain.com depending on where they where so in the office if they send an email to sombody at domain.com the server would get it and forward it to there respective address. I know this might not be the best way to do it but it works and works well.
Sorry for the long post if you have any questions please post and i will keep an eye on it.