Test inbound mail flow in Exchange Server

After installing and configuring Exchange Server, the next step is to test the mail flow. In the previous article, you learned how to test internal mail flow in Exchange Server. In this article, you are going to test inbound mail flow in Exchange Server 2016. Do you have another version of Exchange Server running in the organization? Don’t worry; testing the inbound mail flow will work the same with other Exchange Server versions. In the next article, you will test outbound mail flow in Exchange Server.

Prepare the test email account

Start Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Web Access (OWA) and sign in with an on-premises mailbox. In my example, we will use Microsoft Outlook and the user James.

Now that we signed in, we can start testing the inbound mail flow in Exchange Server.

How to test inbound mail flow in Exchange Server?

Most of the engineers create an email account on Gmail.com or Outlook.com. After creating a Gmail account, you sign in and send an email to the email address hosted on the Exchange Server. If the email arrives in the mailbox, all is working fine. If not, you will troubleshoot to fix the issue.

Unfortunately, this is not the correct way of testing. Microsoft provides a web-based tool to test the inbound SMTP. The test tool is called Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer, and we recommend you to test the inbound mail flow with it.

Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer (ExRCA)

Why we recommend the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer:

• External mail provider doesn’t give you a guarantee that it’s working fine at that time of testing
• External mail can have a delay that’s not associated with your infrastructure
• Useful when diagnosing problems as it shows a test detail

Test inbound mail flow in Exchange Server

Go to Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer, also known as ExRCA.com.

In the left menu, click on Exchange Server and follow with Inbound SMTP Email. You can also go directly to Inbound SMTP Email.

Enter the email address that you like to test the inbound mail flow on. Fill in the captcha and click Perform Test.

Testing is being performed. This will not take long.

Testing is finished, and it’s showing connectivity test successful with a green checkmark in front. Inbound SMTP mail flow was verified successfully.

Click Expand All if you like to see more details regarding the inbound test mail flow. You can see that the test email message was delivered successfully.

An email is being sent to the mailbox of the user. If you have more than one MX record configured, the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer will perform the same test for all of those MX records. You will see multiple emails arriving in the inbox, one per MX record. EXOIP only has one MX record, so only one test message arrived.

Inbound mail flow is working successfully. Did the testing work for you?

Read more: Exchange Server internal mail flow not working »

Conclusion

In this article, you learned how to test inbound mail flow in Exchange Server. Use the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer and test the inbound mail flow. The test will not take long, and a green check mark will show up if the test was successful. Check the details if you want more information regarding the test. Also, an email will be sent to the mailbox that you used for testing.

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