Voicemail to Exchange Contacts

[srpm]

I'm trying to figure out what happens to voicemails left with Unity when a user does not have an Exchange mailbox configured and instead is just a contact in Exchange that auto forwards emails to an external email address.

We have a bunch of employees who only use a customer's email system and the only presence they have in our Exchange environment is a contact record that auto forwards all emails to this customer email address.  Previously we had been creating a dummy AD account and corresponding Exchange mailbox in order to add them to Unity.  This was done, as far as I know, as a requirement when we were on Unity 4.x.  We upgraded to 8.6 earlier this summer and continued the practice.  However, I was playing around recently and just added an employee to Unity without going through the process of creating a dummy AD account and corresponding Exchange mailbox.  They get their VMs just fine on their phones, but I'm curious what happens to the email side with Single Inbox.  As far as I can tell, the VM is not delivered via email to their customer email address.  Does it just error out and it's a no harm/no foul situation?  If so, is that denoted in any logs viewable via RTMT?

Thanks for any info you can give me on this.

[Jonathan Schulenberg · Accepted solution]

If you are creating a CXN mailbox when there is no corrosponding Exchange mailbox then the EWS API calls to Exchange will fail and generate errors. That isn't necessarily going to blow the solution up but definitely isn't a good solution.

The correct solution to this to just use the Edit > Message Actions option to set the message for Relay and specify the email address it should SMTP relay the message to. It will use the SMTP Smarthost for this. In this case you can/should remove the UM Service from their mailbox.

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[srpm]

Thanks for this.  For some reason, I didn't know you replied until just now.

As a follow-up question, if I just remove the UM service from their mailbox, would that stop the integration with Exchange?  I assume that is the case.  These employees probably don't care to receive their VMs in their email as they've gotten along so far without it.  Or would the errors still exist since I'm importing them as contacts?