At first, using my UB email account as my primary send from address wasn’t difficult because the software I used (I believe it was postfix/horde which I ran on my own system).  I simply could specify the send as address and all emal is sent from my Buffalo account although it really was being sent from my server that handles phil@matthouse.us (my central email account where all email goes before I see it).  This worked great even through my transition to hotmail plus (yes I paid for it) and mailxchange.

Unfortunately, when I began using Microsoft Exchange, I could not send from a certain address so I had to configure the server to accept / send mail from my buffalo account. This technically means if UB forwarded mail to my server with all their other servers, my server would accept email for my account.  This is the only easy way of making my exchange server send from my buffalo account.

Fortunately, setting my exchange server to handle my buffalo.edu mail fixed most of the problems, although the global mail system doesn’t send mail to it (and that’s fine with me).  The problem is, UB runs a cluster of Exchange mailservers for their domain.  With exchange servers comes something called autodiscover which is meant to set up exchange clients to handle mail automatically (most notably outlook 2007).

A month ago, little did I know that autodiscover existed on the buffalo.edu domain.  When I set up outlook 2007 as a local client, this caused a major problem even after I manually configured my email account for exchange.  The problem was, outlook 2007 is configured to get information from auto discover every 5 minutes if it exists meaning it bothered me every 5 minutes.

Today I decided to fix this issue once and for all.  My solution was to change the auto discover address on my local computer to override the configured address on the internet.  I knew that on linux, there is something called /etc/hosts which is the host file.  You can easily add an ip / value to this file and it will override whatever is on the internet lookup system.  I decided to find an alternative that worked in Windows, and sure enough, there is a hosts file in Windows as well!

If you goto Drive:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\ you should see a bunch of files. One will be named “hosts”. Simply edit this file using an elevated notepad and you should be set to go.  I mean elevated as in find notepad in your start menu and run it as administrator (in the right click menu).  For me, I added the entry “127.0.0.2 autodiscover.buffalo.edu” which solved my outlook problem.  127.0.0.2 is an invalid ip address although its close to the loopback address.

This caused outlook to look for an auto discover server and fail thus not prompting me anymore.  This is also useful if for testing sites locally when developing websites. Hopefully this helps you, I know it helped me.