A simple way to test if the Exchange server is processing emails is by using telnet & SMTP commands.
First open a telnet client. The simplest is to open a Command Prompt and type:
“telnet yourexchangeserver 25” and press Enter
The Command Prompt will start the telnet client and try to connect to the mail server. The email server will post a 220 message that the mail service is ready. Now type “helo” and press enter.
The email server will reply to the helo command with a 250 Hello message. After that we need to specify the sender using the “mail from:”comand. Type “mail from: [email protected]” and press enter.
If the sender is accepted the email server will reply with a 250 2.1.0 Sender OK message.
Now we need to add the recipient using the “rcpt to:” command. Type “rcpt to: [email protected]” and press enter.
If the recipient is accepted then the email server will reply with a 250 2.1.5 Recipient OK message.
Now we are ready to add text to the message. Type “data” press Enter and then start writting your message. To send the message type a dot “.” and press Enter. If the message is accepted the server will reply with a 250 2.6.0 message and post the message ID and the email is queued for delivery.
Pantelis Apostolidis is a Sr. Specialist, Azure at Microsoft and a former Microsoft Azure MVP. For the last 20 years, Pantelis has been involved to major cloud projects in Greece and abroad, helping companies to adopt and deploy cloud technologies, driving business value. He is entitled to a lot of Microsoft Expert Certifications, demonstrating his proven experience in delivering high quality solutions. He is an author, blogger and he is acting as a spokesperson for conferences, workshops and webinars. He is also an active member of several communities as a moderator in azureheads.gr and autoexec.gr. Follow him on Twitter @papostolidis.
