Forward emails to external address in Exchange server.

M AService Manager
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Edited by: Andrew Leniart
This article will help you forward emails coming to a mailbox to an email address external to your organization in Exchange 2013, 2016 and 2019
There are cases we have to forward a mailbox to an external address e.g. gmail.com, yahoo.com, or other address which does not belong to your domain. For example, if you just want to forward all emails of an employee to an external address you can use the "Mail Flow" feature in Exchange server. Let's see how it can be done.

Step1  Create Mail Contact.
Open Exchange Admin Center and create a " Mail Contact"


If you want to hide the external address from AddressBook Please tick " Hide from address lists".


Step2. Configure forwarding

Open Exchange Admin Center and select the mailbox you need to forward the email to an external address. Open properties of the mailbox.


Go to " mailbox features" and scroll down and click on " View details" under Mail Flow. 


Tick " Enable forwarding" and click on " Browse".

 
Select the newly created mail contact and click OK.


If you want to deliver emails to the mailbox as well please tick " Deliver message to both forwarding address and mailbox". I.e. Email will be delivered to the mailbox and one copy will be forwarded to the external address if you enable this.

Click OK
Click Save

 
You can do the same thing by using Exchange Management Shell. Following is the command you'll need.

New-MailContact -Name "Miller John" -ExternalEmailAddress millerjohn@yahoo.com
Set-Mailbox “Test User” -ForwardingAddress millerjohn@yahoo.com
If you want to deliver emails on the mailbox as well please replace the second command with the following command.

Set-Mailbox “Test User” -ForwardingAddress millerjohn@yahoo.com -DeliverToMailboxAndForward $True
Now mailbox forward to external address is set from Exchange server.

I have written articles to cover the Exchange administration on all versions of Exchange (see below):



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M AService Manager
CERTIFIED EXPERT
Most Valuable Expert2017 and 2020.
O365, Exchange Server,Windows Server, Active Directory, Virtualization, Teams and Email Migration Expert.

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