Exchanging Experts »
I signed up for an account at Experts Exchange to see if I could get this problem submitted. I figured the $10 was well worth it for all the aggravation I had (and was causing others). I submitted three questions on the topic in a handful of minutes, in different expert areas, to see if I could generate some discussion in different techniques, since none of the ones I had tried seemed to work. While I did receive two responses, neither was particularly useful.
I went back to pulling out my hair. Finally I had a brainstorm, and dropped NAT altogether on the mail server I'm trying to access. Instead, I just assigned the external IP address to the NIC card as an alternate address (luckily you can do that in some versions of Windows). I kept NAT in place for everything else. Once I did, it was just a matter of tweaking the access lists to make sure I could get to the server - and hopefully keep everyone else from doing the same - and it seems like it's working. Very cool.
Now I just need to decide what I'm going to do with this month-long membership to Experts Exchange. Since it did lead to me finding an answer, I guess that I can't complain too much. I just don't know that their site specifically helped. More than likely it was that "you told someone and asked for help, now you're going to find out what a moron you are" syndrome that got my brain moving. In any case, since I use the site pretty regularly, thanks to the search results turned up by Google, I think that I'll let this month run out and just not renew. They can keep the $10, because while I didn't find this answer, I've found plenty there to make it money well spent.
