Gateway Tasks

The functionality you need to design for your specific gateway is determined by the characteristics of the mail systems it connects. The tasks performed by a typical gateway include the following:

• Message transfer Delivery of messages to foreign message systems.
• Address mapping Translating between Microsoft Exchange Server addresses and the address format of foreign message systems.
• Message content translation Converting between the data formats used by Microsoft Exchange Server and foreign message systems. For example, performing RTF to plain text conversion.
• Backboning Transparently connecting two Microsoft Exchange Servers by means of an intermediate foreign message system.
• Performance monitoring Monitoring the performace of a gateway, both for self-tuning and for use by an administrator.
• Event logging Recording events such as deliveries and error conditions to a log file.
• Error handling Recovering gracefully from error conditions.
• Message tracking Being able to generate appropriate delivery and non-delivery reports.
• Configuration management Providing the administrator with a way to configure the gateway.
• Directory synchronization Keeping the directories of two Microsoft Exchange Servers that are connected by the gateway synchronized with each other.

These tasks are described in the following sections.