Using Response Point with Exchange 2007

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We’ve heard this one a couple of times recently.  You’ve configured your mail server settings in Response Point, provided an email address for your extension, called yourself and left a voicemail to test that everything works.  If you received the voicemail in your email, then you’ve done everything fine.

But what if you never received the voicemail in your email box?  What’s up with that?

Firstly, check the RP event log to see if RP reported any errors.  If you did get an error/warning, try the following:

  1. Can you enter the same credentials into Outlook Express on Windows XP (a.k.a. “Windows Mail” on Vista) and send mail from there?
  2. If you can’t connect to the server, a reasonable chance is that the problem is one of the following:
    1. Network connectivity
    2. Mis-typed server name or port
    3. The certificate on the server is invalid.  Try connecting with SSL turned off.
  3. If the server rejected the user name or password, they may be incorrect or mistyped
  4. If RP lost its connection to the server, this may depend on your mail server configuration.  For example, it may have rejected your user name, password or to/from address.  Or it may have identified your message as spam and dropped the connection.

So what’s the right configuration for your mail server?  There are lots of different mail servers out there, so I’ll talk about Exchange 2007 because it’s the latest and (of course) greatest.

  1. Create a user for RP in Exchange Server
  2. Connect RP to a Connector in the Exchange Hub Transport Server
  3. Make sure Exchange has Basic authentication enabled
  4. Enable TLS on the Hub Transport Server, and give it a valid certificate.
  5. Configured RP to use Basic authentication, with the correct user name and password, and SSL.
  6. If you’ve set the RP password to expire in Exchange, make sure you update it on Exchange and RP before it expires (hey, obvious I know, but if I didn’t say it…)
  7. A couple of things to NOT do:
    1. RP does not support mutual TLS, so don’t switch that on in Exchange
    2. Best not to connect RP to the Exchange Edge Transport Server, since this may reject your voicemails as spam.  See https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996562.aspx

(P.S. thanks to Slava for writing the document I plagiarized for this post).