Adding external emails in AD Distribution Groups

Today I've been 'playing' with EventTriggers as detailed in an earlier post How to use Eventtriggers.exe to send e-mail based on Event IDs.

I'm using bmail to fire off an email when an EventID (2031) is logged (by a performance alert) in the Event Viewer.

Todays challange was that I wanted to send the resulting email notification to multiple recipients, some of which were in the format [mobilenumber]@esendex.net (which delivers the email alert as an SMS to a mobile phone).

I found the first part of the solution on the following website:
Adding external emails in AD Distribution Groups - Spiceworks Community

By creating a Distribution Group in Active Directory, and adding my contacts to that group, I could now send the alert to the email address of the distribution group and let Exchange do the rest.

The second part of the solution was to add an SMTP Connector to our Exchange server to forward emails addressed to [mobilenumber]@esendex.net through to my Esendex account which would deliver the email as an SMS to an oncall engineers mobile phone. If I wanted to be really cruel, I could address the email to [mobilenumber]@voice.esendex.net and this would deliver the email as a voice message!

(WARNING! shameless plug alert)
Take a look at these websites if you want more information on Email to SMS, configuring an SMTP Connector for Exchange, or any of Esendex's Services.