Recently I was asked to configure a forward mail box in CRM 2016 on premise instance. I read about it but never configured one.

Scenario: There are more than 10 mailboxes available for different users to receive emails. All these mailboxes were configured to forward emails to another mailbox as an attachment which is a forward mailbox. On receiving an email, add them to a specific queue in CRM 2016.

Notes: Existing mailboxes were implemented in CRM 2011 on premise with email router in place. We are sure that we don’t need email router in CRM 2016 as we can use Server side sync for this purpose.

Our configuration was CRM 2016 On-premise and Exchange server online.

Incorrect configurations: Initially we configured Destination mailbox (refer to image above) as a normal mailbox in CRM 2016 with server side synchronisation on with POP3 as incoming profile. Though “test and enable mailbox” was successful, it couldn’t pull all emails from the mailbox.

Resolution steps: we ran trace and found that system is unable to convert POP3 message to exchange server message. This prompted us to change the configuration from POP3 to Exchange server.

When tested, it was successful. However, we received all emails as attachments into CRM with TO address being Destination mailbox.

This was never an acceptable solution as every item needs to be opened, then navigate to attachments and then double click to view the actual email. This also comes with another issue which is replying. When users try to reply, it may go to the Destination mailbox and keep on going round and round.

It was configuration issue, which resulted in downloading each email as attachment from mailbox to email entity. After a bit of research, understood that, mailbox1, mailbox2, mailbox3 till mailboxn need to be configured as normal mailboxes with incoming method set to Server Side Synchronization and Destination mailbox to be configured as forward mailbox.

We also created a process in CRM which will trigger on create of email and move each email to respective queue.