Exercise 2.18: Controlling mail routing to the Internet

Overview

When IBM SmartCloud™ Notes® (SmartCloud Notes) users address mail to users in external Internet domains, by default, the SmartCloud Notes service manages the routing. An external Internet domain is a domain that the service has not verified as owned by your company. You can choose to use a company-controlled SMTP host server to route this mail, instead. Controlling the routing allows you to perform actions such as content filtering and message auditing on all messages addressed to the Internet. To configure company-controlled routing to external Internet domains, you use SmartCloud Notes Administration Panel Account Settings to specify the SMTP host name to perform the routing. The SmartCloud Notes service performs virus scanning and spam filtering on the outbound messages, and then routes them to your designated SMTP host server. Your SMTP host routes the messages to the Internet. Also, as of August 2012, an administrator can prevent automatic forwarding of email to external addresses You can prevent users from automatically forwarding email to external addresses using mail rules. When users create a mail rule that includes the send copy to action, any addresses in domains that are not owned by your company are ignored. Users can still forward email to any address manually.

Objectives

In this exercise, you will:

• Prepare your environment to route SMTP mail addressed to external internet domains through a specified SMTP host
• Prevent automatic forwarding by your users of email to external addresses.
  
  

Glossary

Term	Definition
External Internet Domain	An Internet domain that the SmartCloud Notes service has not verified as owned by your company.

Parent topic: Controlling messages in IBM SmartCloud Notes
Previous topic: Exercise 2.17: Removing users from the Exclude List
Next topic: Exercise 2.19: Administrator controlled white-black lists for inbound mail messages

Procedure

Before you perform this procedure, configure your SMTP host server to:

• accept mail from smtp.notes.lotuslive.com
• route the mail to the Internet
  
  

1. Log on to the service using the e-mail address and password of a SmartCloud Notes user with the Administrator role.
   
   
2. If your user account also has the User role, click Administration -> Manage Organization at the top of the dashboard. Otherwise, skip to the next step.
   
   
3. Click Lotus Notes.
   
   
4. Click Account Settings.
   
   
5. From the left navigation pane, click Email Management.
   
   
6. Locate the section Manage Routing to External Internet Domains. In the field SMTP server host name, enter the IP address of the SMTP relay host that your company wants to use.
   
   
7. To prevent users from automatically forwarding email to external addresses using mail rules, select the option Do not allow automatic forwarding to external addresses.
   
   
   
Note: If you enable this option, then when users create a mail rule that includes the "send copy to" action, any addresses in domains that are not owned by your company are ignored. Users are not prevented from creating such mail rules, and they don't get any error indication when the attempt to forward is blocked. Users can still forward email to any address manually. It may take up to 15 minutes for this change to take effect on all mail servers.

8. Click Save.
   
   
9. Results: Mail sent from clients in this company to an external internet domain will route through the specified SMTP relay host. Users will be prevented from automatically forwarding email to external addresses using mail rules.
   

Troubleshooting

Problem	Resolution
When attempting to save the SMTP server host name, I receive the error SMTP relay host cannot be reached.	Make sure the host name is valid (can be resolved by the DNS), is properly formatted, and that the server has SMTP listening.
When attempting to save the SMTP server host name, I receive the error Not a valid DNS name or IP address.	Make sure the host name is valid (can be resolved by the DNS) and is properly formatted.

Test Yourself

Question

Answer

How can I confirm that Internet mail is routed through the specified SMTP host?

You can send a test Internet message to a recipient and look at the fields in the received message to verify its route. Log in to SmartCloud Notes using a user in your company. Send an Internet message to a recipient, preferably one that uses Lotus® Notes. Confirm the message is received. Open the received message using a Lotus Notes client and go into Document properties. Scroll down until you see several "Received" fields. Starting at the bottom one, click on each "Received" field to see the hops that the message took. Eventually you will come to one that matches the host specified as the SMTP server host name.