SBS 2003 & Email

theshadow

Hi there
Recently setup SBS 2003 with 7 clients and all went well, thank god. Anyway, waiting for domain name registration I have time investigate my email options. From what I've seen so far using the POP3 Connector Manager seems the easiest option given the number of clients and my experience. Anyway I have a few questions if anyone can help me would be most greatful:
When you use the Internet & Email Wizard it asks you to specify your Email Delivery Method, I set it to mail1.eircom.net as this is our ISP. Should I selected the DNS as Microsoft documentation recommends. If so does this require the DNS or something else to be configured?
In the POP3 Conector Manager you can specify how often to check email, the minimum being 15min. Does this mean users only can only send/receive email every 15mins, seems a long time to me.
I have done a trial run on one of the account using an old eircom account and got it to receive email fine and eventually got it to receive when I added the eircom smtp to the user account settings. However the email took an hour to be delivery?
Thanks

theshadow

Update:
Domain name registration complete and setup one account with the POP3 Connector. It receives email fine but when I try to send I get the following error:
553 sorry that domain is not in my allowed rcpthost
BTW, I setup the server to forward outgoing email to mail1.eircom.net. Do I need to contact eircom to allow us to forward this way?
Thanks

Zenith74

The POP connector doesn't really make things any easier then having MX records pointed to your server, it's just a different but equally compex way of doing it. The benefit to use POP is your server doesn't need to be online constantly, though if you have broadband that won't be an issue anyway. Personally I avoid POP wherever possible, you have far more control with an SMTP feed IMHO.

You're better off relaying through the likes of mail1.eircom.net (assuming you're on Eircom broadband/dialup). The problem is that these days most spam filtering software will perform reverse DNS lookups on servers sending them mail, so unless you have a public static IP and reverse DNS records registered you will find some of your outgoing email is rejected by the receiving server. But by relaying through mail1.eircom.net it's this address the receiving server sees, and Eircom will have proper reverse DNS records setup.

The 15minutes is how often your Exchange server will fetch mail from the various POP accounts. You internal users can click send/receive whenever they want. Outgoing mails should be sent straight away, while incoming will only come in every 15mins or so. This is another reason that avoiding the POP Connector is better.

Can you post the full 553 error message? At a guess I'd say you've set something up incorrectly on your Exchange server, have you added * to the Address Space of the SMTP connector on the server?

No you don't need to notify Eircom, provided you are using Eircom as your ISP (broadband ro dialup) you will be allowed relay through mail1.eircom.net.

kyper

IMHO the best way to set up SBS for mail for something like this is to set up a catchall email address for the domain. Then have SBS pull down all the mail for that domain via pop3 and sort it into mailboxes on the SBS. Then relay your outgoing mail through an ISP's smtp server, one that supposed SMTP Authentication for sending mail tends to work best in my experience (especially if your SBS will be serving more than one domain).

If you need more info on a setup like this just let me know (you can pm me if I dont respond to the post)

Hope that helps.

Mark

theshadow

Thanks guys. It's turns out they're not using eircom but iol, they have never received a bill for broadband in 2 years! They just assumed it was eircom as they provide the telephone etc. Anyway changed the outgoing server to mail.iol.ie and it's working fine, however some of the outgoing mail seems to take up to an hour to arrive.

theshadow

Update. Under connectors in Exchange, SMTP Connector, connection time was set to 1 hour, changed it to Always Run, I presume that was the reason will have to wait till tomorrow to find out.