I've setup a brand new Exchange 2013 mail server in a test environment. I've never worked with Exchange Server 2013 before and haven't had much luck finding good "instructional" info on it. The last Exchange server I administered was 2003 and that was years ago.
At first, my primary concern was the Exchange Server receiving inbound SMTP email from special systems on the network that would be generating reports and sending them via SMTP to the Administrator's mailbox on the Exchange Server. They reports weren't showing up in the mailbox. So I went through several steps to troubleshoot the SMTP connectivity. First I found that my workstation had the anti-virus blocking smtp, so the testing (for troubleshooting purposes) I was attempting to do from my workstation was getting block at my workstation. So I disabled the a/v temporarily. But I found that I still didn't seem to be getting through. So I setup a monitoring filter on our perimeter firewall and found that I had neglected to create a firewall rule to allow SMTP traffic from my workstation to the Exchange server in the test network security zone. So, I took care of that. Then I fired up a windump (windump -npi 1 -s1518 -wC:\Temp\smtp.enc port 25) on the Exchange server and tried again. But first I tried to manually connect to the SMTP receive connector on the Exchange server by doing a telnet <Exchange server ip address> 25. This time I was able to successfully connect. So I ran an email testing program that I wrote called MailTest. But after it completed successfully, when I logged into the Administrator account's mailbox on the Exchange Server, the mailbox was still empty. I tried a couple more times but the mailbox was still empty (I tried accessing the mailbox with both a browser (via OWA) and with the full Microsoft Outlook client).
I have only two users in this test Exchange Server 2013 server. I decided to then take a different path. Using the Administrator's mailbox, I sent an ordinary email to the Exchange mailbox of the other internal user. Then I logged out of Exchange OWA and I logged out of Windows. Then I logged into Windows with the other user account. Then I logged into Exchange OWA with that users account and got into their mailbox. Then I checked their inbox. No email from the Administrator account. So, I sent an email from their account to the Administrator account. Then I logged out of Exchange, logged out of Windows, logged back in using the Administrator account, and logged back into Exchange with the Administrator account. Then I checked the Administrator account's inbox. No email. So this issue is not specific to SMTP. No email is being routed through the email system, not even email that is going between user accounts that are internal mailboxes of the Exchange Server system.
Obviously, I either have something misconfigured or there is something that needs to be configured that I haven't configured. But not being familiar with Exchange Server 2013, I don't know what it could be or where to look for it.
Can someone help me out?