MSCRM Email Router: Incoming Status: Failure - The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden.

Published on 04 January 2008 • Estimated reading time: 1 minutes

When configuring the MSCRM 4.0 email router for Exchange incoming, you may get the following message when testing: Incoming Status: Failure – The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden.

This is actually caused by a poor UI (IMHO), which kinda leads you to configure it wrong. Here’s what happens: the outgoing section has a checkbox for using SSL and asks for a server name, while the incoming section asks for a URL—and it automatically fills in http://. So, you naturally enter your server like this: http://myexchange.

But since Exchange runs on SSL, the correct format should be https://myexchange.

If that doesn’t resolve the issue, open the URL you’re using in a web browser to check if it works. That way, you’ll get more detailed error information about the actual cause.