The present invention provides for a messaging system that automatically identifies a forest that corresponds to a particular recipient of a message, without using a common or unified directory that maps forests with recipients. In a network with multiple forests, each forest having multiple recipients, when a message is received at a message server with a destination address that does not uniquely identify a particular forest, the present invention provides for using a standard messaging protocol for querying each forest. The forests respond with status codes that indicate whether or not a recipient associated with the destination address corresponds to the forest being queried. If a status code indicates that the recipient corresponds to the particular forest, information may be stored and used to quarry that particular forest first, before querying other forests within the network.