Exchange Hosting clients - if you are having problems sending email to InterConnected.com

Dear Wonderful Exchange clients,

I've recently moved InterConnected.com's Exchange service to a new provider called Rackspace.

I have always admired Rackspace, and now that their Exchange service is roughly comparable in price to our current provider, Exchange Hosting, I undertook to investigate it further by experimenting on myself. One consequence of this for any of my clients whose Exchange service is still with Exchange Hosting (or any other client of Exchange Hosting who has sent email to InterConnected.com in the past) is that the remembered email address in the Nickname file of Outlook is no longer correct.

The Nickname file is that which, in all versions of Outlook prior to 2010, remembered each and every email address to which the user sent an email, regardless of whether or not the user put that email address in his/her Outlook Contacts. It saves whatever you type, whether or not the email address is correct. In this particular circumstance, as with a few others, the Nickname file is remembering things when we'd rather it didn't: things that are actually preventing some people from being able to send emails to InterConnected.com. To fix this, if you receive an error sending an email to an email address at InterConnected.com: On any machine where you're seeing the problem sending such an email, open a new email, start typing the email address that is giving you problems (Ferguson@interconnected.com, support@interconnected.com, etc.), and then delete the auto-popup that includes that email address. This is the thing stored in the nickname file, and it's wrong. Once you delete it, you can either type in the correct email address (and yes, Outlook will remember that in the nickname file) or select it from your address book, if it's in there.

In general it is my recommendation, and that of Microsoft, that you add people with whom you correspond to the Outlook Contacts folder, keeping their information, including email addresses, up to date in there, rather than relying on the Nickname file (or Suggested Contacts in Outlook 2010)

Here's a visual. The item circled in blue is what I'd be looking to delete in this case:

This method can also come in handy of you've ever typed in an incorrect email address and had Outlook remember it. You can delete the incorrecly-typed address this same way!

Please contact me if you need assistance with this.

Cheers,

Don