FYI: Windows SMTP Relay Software

Shinji

I'm sure quite a lot of you are on dialups of some description, and those of you who aren't are probably in the same boat as myself - namely, not trusting your ISPs email systems quite as far as you could throw their head sysadmin (undoubtedly a fat bearded and generally unthrowable bloke of some description).

To explain briefly: I get my email from a variety of places, be it my isp (my @ntlworld.com address), my web hosting venture (a variety of my own domains and places such as @electricdeath.com) and a few other sundry places. These all come in on various POP3 mailboxes, not a problem, I'm happy as larry with that lot.

It's outgoing mail that's the problem. If I'm dialling up with different providers (laptop and mobile phone, or even laptop and hotel phone outside this country, whatever), I have to change my outgoing mail (SMTP) server every time I dial in, because ISPs generally don't let people on other ISPs use their SMTP servers - it's a spam prevention thing, allegedly. Even on NTL, I've had big trouble with SMTP, because their server is rubbish.

Solution - run an SMTP server on my own machine! It's a very simple piece of software at the end of the day - all it needs to do is accept mail from your email program (be it Outlook or The Bat! or whatever, just type "localhost" where you'd normally have an SMTP server address) and then send it on to the local mailserver of whoever you've just sent it to. Not rocket science by any means.

I've been using a third-party SMTP relay on my system for a while, but when I upgraded to Windows XP I decided it was time to have a look around and see if I had the best software solution for what I wanted to do.

The three candidates I found, all of them freeware, were...

Inframail Personal Edition
http://www.infradig.com/infradig/inframail/index.shtml

This is a little application which runs in your tray, and is actually designed to provide a whole suite of email functionality. As a result it's excessively complex; getting it all up and running through either the web admin interface or the config files was much trickier than the others. Once it was sorted, it just sat there and did its job, but there were some problems.

For a start, it takes an age to load up Inframail; admittedly this is something that'll be in your Startup group but it's still annoying that it can take over a minute to initialise. The other issue is also speed related - it isn't exactly nippy about sending mails, and can take a good while between each one, so it's no good for stuff like automated bounces or if you're running mailing lists in The Bat!...

Hermes Mail Server
http://www.alixoft.com/software/hermes.htm

This is a bit more like it. A very lightweight app, Hermes runs either as a service or as an application, and launches extremely fast. Mail processing is also speedy, and the program, for the most part, just sits there and works transparently. For those times when you need to poke it, there's a good configuration app.

Configuration was very simple - just paste in a DNS server address, enable the SMTP Client and SMTP Agent, and you're away. However, there were some issues.

Logging is poor, for one - unless you set it to log to a text file, you can't look back through the logs for errors, even recent ones. I also experienced some very annoying circumstances where the service would inexplicably turn itself off and require a good kick to get it going again, and sometimes mail would sit in the queue without being sent for no apparent reason.


ArGoSoft Mailserver Freeware
http://www.argosoft.com/applications/mailserver/

Now this really IS simple to set up. Two DNS server addresses and you're cooking with gas! It runs as a tray application - there's a service version, but the advantages are minimal and you have to pay for it, from what I can gather. The tray icon gives you access to the log window, which has full scrollback (unlike Hermes) and changes colour depending on whether there's anything in the queue, so if it's yellow, you know there's undelivered mail - very handy.

My only problem with it is that it tends to give up if it can't deliver mail the first time, but realistically, retrying isn't necessarily going to help that much, so I'm not that bothered by this. Otherwise, it loads quickly, it's easy to configure and install, it sends mail very speedily indeed, and has very few flaws. It's certainly the one I'll be sticking with, both on the laptop, on my own machine here, and in work (as part of my ongoing battle with our evil IT department, who want us to use Lotus Notes... I think NOT!).



Hope this was all of some use to someone...

dahamsta

I used to have this problem meself, as did my business partner in the US - he got locked out of the place he used to work (chancer shouldn't have been using their servers anyway), and I got weed-off with having about ten different accounts. I came at it from another angle, using POP3-Before-SMTP. That means that you have to check your email before you can use the SMTP server, and it works by logging your IP address when you login to the POP3 server, and storing it until a defined timeout. Very handy. I don't know what's on my machine (a RaQ), but the one Gaz uses is running DRAC, and aside from a problem with startup, he seems quite happy with it. Course, this is drifting off topic, because you don't need to install anything in Windows, but I thought some people might find it interesting/useful.

adam

MarcusGarvey

Doesn't windows 2k and xp have an SMTP server ? I think there is as I remember an exploit for it.

Shinji

They do indeed. It's not very good - there are a LOT of exploits

MarcusGarvey

Ah yeah, better to be safe.

Draco

Originally posted by Shinji
because ISPs generally don't let people on other ISPs use their SMTP servers - it's a spam prevention thing, allegedly. [/i]

No allegedly. Spammers use open relays so they don't have to pay for the bandwidth used in sending 1 million mails.