We're a medium sized, tight-budgeted, State University.  Here's our
situation, we have faculty/staff email, about 1500 accounts on Exchange
2003, with email addresses like:

Lynne.Seamans@millersville.edu   (firstname.lastname@millersville.edu)

We have our students (about 10,000 accounts) on a Solaris machine named
"marauder" using a web front end to access their email.   Their email
address is abstudent@marauder.millersville.edu.
(firstImiddleIlastname@marauder.millersville.edu)

Not surprisingly, students are griping about their email address being too
long.

We don't want to move them over to Exchange, mostly for financial reasons,
so we are looking for a way to shorten their email addresses to
abstudent@millersville.edu  (i.e., take the node name out).

So, what do other folks do?

We have had the following ideas:

(1)  In the faculty/staff Exchange server, set the "Forward all mail with
unresolved recipients to:" field to Marauder (the student email server)
   (a)  Concern about performance hit on our Exchange Server forwarding all
the student email
   (b)  Concern about performance hit on solaris handing all true NDR's for
the organization
    (c)  concern about discrepancy in "From" address and perceived email
address.. meaning, a student could say "My email address is
abstudent@millersville.edu", but his "From" would be "abstudent
@marauder.millersville.edu".  And that could cause problems especially will
mailing lists.
   (d)  If we do this, do i need a special connector?

(2)  Build some kind of linux gateway for ALL mail to go through and somehow
query LDAP to decide which mailhost gets which email
   (a)  concern, honestly, whether we could actually pull this off
   (b)  same issue about email addresses, I think.

Any insights or "what we do" stories would be GREATLY appreciated :)

Lynne.Seamans@millersville.edu
Millersville University
Postmaster & Operating Systems Manager
1-717-871-5857   Boyer Room 202