IIS and SMTP - 3rd party POP3 servers?

Author

3rd party POP3 servers?

vsdotnetguy

2006-02-08, 9:05 pm

Hello,

I am using Windows Small Business Server 2003 as a web server, however, I
also need basic POP3 support. Unfortunately MS has taken the POP3 service
out of this version of Win server.

I know that Exchange is available, but I don't need that behemoth since this
is not a LAN based server but only a co-located web server with basic email.

Does anyone know of a POP3 only server software that will integrate with
IIS6 SMTP?

Also posted in IIS General.

Thanks in advance...vsdotnetguy

Sanford Whiteman

2006-02-09, 2:55 am

>Does anyone know of a POP3 only server software that will integrate with
>IIS6 SMTP?

I don't know of any others that are as deeply tied to the drop
directory structure and such, but any lightweight POP3/SMTP server
will integrate with IIS6 SMTP simply by pointing to the third-party's
SMTP as a smarthost on an alternate port. Just be aware that every
incoming SMTP connection thus creates a second loopback connection to
the other MTA, using both additional TCP/IP sockets and disk I/O --
though this should only matter under load, and you've implied that
this is a light-load situation.

In fact, unless your application has legacy code that only works with
IIS SMTP, you might do well to move completely to using the other
SMTP/POP3 platform. I don't think there are any free- or low-cost
Windows-based MTAs that can perform quite at the level of IIS SMTP,
which makes a pretty mean MTA capable of pushing millions of messages
per day. But if you don't need that level of capacity, the question
is just which third-party to invest the time to learn. We've rolled
out Mercury/32, MailEnable, and SmarterMail, to name three. I think
any of these should do fine, keep your budget low, and are stable and
enough to host a few hundred to a few thousand POP3-only accounts
easily.

--Sandy