Now that we have that out of the way, I have seen a lot of people wondering how to configure email alerts from Symantec BackupExec. Most are having issues receiving the alerts once they have configured the server settings. The application seems to not want to send email through a local Exchange Server (Relay). I have had this issue in the past myself and have a few ways to get around this that I thought I would share with you - so lets get started.

First off, when configuring the Alert Settings, in older versions of BackupExec (9.X, 10.X, 11.X), you will notice that there are no options for SMTP authentication, which means you need a relay. One way around this is if your ISP allows you to relay through their servers when behind an IP assigned by them. If this applies to you, you can ask them what their outbound SMTP server address is and use that as a relay. This typically works with BellSouth and FDN in my experience. Ask your ISP or just test this configuration and see if it works with your Internet Provider.

The second method is relatively easy and only requires that you use localhost as your SMTP server. You can do this in a few situations. The first is if you have BackupExec installed on your Exchange server or SBS Server locally. Simply open Exchange System Manager, Expand Administrative Groups > First Administrative Group > Servers > [You Server Name] > Protocols > SMTP. Right Click the Default SMTP Virtual Server and choose properties. Go to the Access tab and click the Relay button. You should see that your local subnet as well as the local host are allowed to relay. If you do not see this, add these items to the allow relay list and configure BackupExec to use Localhost (127.0.0.1) as the mail server. Test these settings under the recipients configuration. This should also work for remote machines, just add the IP address of the remote machine that you want to allow to relay.

The third method uses the MAPI configuration. To do this, you will need to create a contact in Active Directory Users and Computers that has the email address that you would like to receive alerts to assigned to it. I am not going to go into how to create a contact in this post. After creating the contact, open BackupExec, go to Email and Pager notifications. Choose the MAPI Configuration tab and specify your Exchange Server under MAPI mail server. For mailbox name, Specify the contact that you created earlier. When messages are sent to this contact, they should go to the email address that is associated with the contact. I am not sure if this works on servers that are remote to the Exchange server though so you will have to experiment if your BackupExec installation is not on the same machine that Exchange lives on.

If all of the above do not work for you, I suggest upgrading to the latest version of BackupExec (version 12.X as of this post) which allows SMTP authentication to be configured for outbound email. Alternatively, you could install SMTP on a remote server (whether it runs BackupExec or not) and allow relay only from the servers that you want alerts sent from. This can be done under Add/Remove Programs > Add/Remove Windows Components: Under – Application Server > Internet Information Services > SMTP Service. I will not go into the details of this configuration but it is fairly easy to set up and as always, google.com can assist.

Jason (Digitalkid)
www.954network.com