Another overly elaborate and complex problem :-D
The Exchange server at uni (lets call it exchange.xxx.ac.uk is not accessible from outside the uni intranet. But the university provides Outlook Web Access on the web server owa.xxx.ac.uk. I wanted to configure a mail client on my home computer to connect to the Exchange server instead of using Outlook Web Access (which is horrible). I made an assumption that owa.xxx.ac.uk was an alias to a web server running on the Exchange server itself, and I was right: if I configured my mail client with the Exchange server address "owa.xxx.ac.uk" it worked. I could see all my Exchange folders, read emails, move them around, delete them etc.
The problem comes with sending. owa.xxx.ac.uk does not work as an outgoing mail server, so I had to use my ISP's SMTP server for sending. Of course, my ISP's SMTP server doesn't know how to resolve exchange.xxx.ac.uk, so if I want to send an email to somebody@exchange.xxx.ac.uk, it bounces saying it can't resolve the host.
Short of convincing the university to expose the exchange.xxx.ac.uk to the Internet, is there any way around this? Maybe a local SMTP server which has exchange.xxx.ac.uk in its hosts list so that it can be resolved to the IP address of owa.xxx.ac.uk. I don't actually know if this would work though, since although owa.xxx.ac.uk seems to allow access to the user's mailbox, I don't know whether it is running an inbound mail service.
:crazy: :crazy: :crazy: :crazy: :crazy: