Recently, I noticed that the forwarding rule I set up on my Exchange 2010 account at an organization I help provide IT support wasn’t working. This was on a new Exchange install. I wasn’t that worried about it, nobody contacts me at that address anyway, but it annoyed me a little. Earlier this week I finally looked into it.

Apparently forwarding / redirects to external domain names is disabled by default in Exchange 2007 and 2010. I never really realized this before, I’ve used redirect rules before in Exchange, but not on a new install (that I manage) before. It seems like the Outlook client (or OWA) should be able to check for this, and give the user an error message when they try to create a forwarding rule that would be blocked by this setting.

To change this setting, open the Exchange Management Console, and drill down to the Organization Configuration -> Hub Transport. Under the Remote Domains tab, open the Default domain.

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Then, on the format tab, check the “Allow automatic forward” box.

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Alternatively, from the Exchange Management Shell (PowerShell rocks!), this will do the trick:

set-remotedomain -identity Default -AutoForwardEnabled $true