Lesson learned in domain naming

I setup a new Foreign SMTP Domain recently so e-mail could be sent to a host outside of the Domino domain. Whenever I sent a message to this domain the Domino server hosting the connection would try to place the message in SMTP.box. SMTP.box hasn't been used since R4 SMTP MTA days.

I also noticed Domino was stripping the local primary internet domain off of the address. For instance, if the Domino domain hosted the abc.com internet domain and the foreign SMTP domain was setup to be external.abc.com, any message sent to test@external.abc.com would end up being test@external in the router mailbox.

After verifying SMTP connectivity to the external host and debugging the router it finally hit me. When setting up the Foreign SMTP Domain document I used the following example:

Internet domain: external.abc.com
Domain name: EXTERNAL

Since I named the internal domain name the same as the external internet sub-domain, Domino stripped the abc.com off of the address and tried to put it in SMTP.box. Changing the internal domain name to something else resolved the issue.