Question:
I am trying to get remote access to my e-mail account. Although I can dial in the domain successfully, when I start Outlook, I receive this error message: “Network problems are preventing connection to the Microsoft Exchange server computer.”

When I try to resolve the name in the property, I received the same error message. Why is this?

Answer:
The first thing you need to check is whether you have RAS (Remote Access Server) properly configured. Go to Control Panel > Network > Services > Remote Access Services, click the Network Button and the Configure Button for TCP/IP. Make sure that the Entire Network radio button is selected at the top. Without that you are restricted to just the machine that hosts the modem and won’t be able to reach your Exchange server.

Once you’ve done that, see if it works. If not, see if you can ping your Exchange server. On the workstation, go to a command prompt and type PING [servername] where [servername] is the name of your Exchange server. If you don’t get a series of “Reply From…” responses, that indicates you still might not have a connection, or your name resolution isn’t working.

Try pinging the server by its IP address by substituting the IP address for the server name. If that does work, then you know the problem is name resolution. The best solution for that is to get a WINS server working properly; the workaround for that is to add your Exchange server to the HOSTS file on your workstation.