I'm new to this forum and need alot of help any assistance will be helpful. I've convinced our boss to let us set up a exchange server for we are starting to use alot of blackberry and windows mobile device and would like to hav access to our task calender contacts on the go. I wanted at first to tke our domain name and host our own email. we have about 10 email addresses for our employees. in the middle of all this was a computer store they suggested that instead of us hosting our own email in house to go ahead and let our internet service provider host it. but we are still going to install exchange and was told told it was still possible to still do the same of what i'm trying to accomplish but instead of configuring it to pull from in house server to pull mail from the pop address where our mail is hosting. is this possible? what kind of problems will we have. please help asap thanks

Yes it is possible. We do exactly that. Our ISP hosts one POP3 mailbox for us. ALL emails that are anything@whatever.com go into that mailbox. We then use software called POPBEAMER, which pulls all of the mail from that mailbox and pushes it into our exchange server. Easy.

so you are saying with pop beamer. I have 10 employees each with thier individual email( ex. bobby@okccellular.com,sam@okccellular.com and so on) with pop beamer each individual would still get thier email seperately and still be able to sync contacts and calender and task? how would this be set up on each work station or would this be set up on exchange server?

Kind Of. What I am saying is you get your ISP to change the individual emails so that they all fall into 1 mailbox. e.g. bobby, sam etc all go into one mailbox on the ISP. Then POPBEAMER can pull the mail down into the 10 individual exchange server mailboxes. Then, rather than your employees accessing their email via POP, they access it via Exchange which you can expose via ISA Server. That's what I do. Alternatively, POPBEAMER CAN pull it from the 10 individual mailboxes, but having 1 makes administration easier as you only need to add a new employee via exchange server. If you don't, you would also have to create a new pop mailbox on the ISP also. Once they are in exchange, you can set up another DNS like myexchange.dyndns.org and set it up to be the IP address of your ISA Server. Set up a rule in ISA to redirect all exchange trafiic to your Exchange server. That way, all your employees can sync calender contacts etc. Once you've done that, you could even very easily set up a VPN rule in ISA Server to give them VPN access. In Short, we have 1 mailbox hosted by our ISP called mail@domain.com. Any mail like sam@domain.com, bobby@domain.com all go into that 1 mailbox. Popbeamer pulls all the mail on a regular basis and resolves sam, bobby and puts it into the appropriate exchange mailbox. Very simple solution.

I would highly suggest that if you are trying to do what you are saying that you purchase Windows Small Business Server 2003. It has a built-in POP3 connector and has wizards that are built-in to take care of most of the hard work. Exchange 2007 would be a little too daunting if you have never set up an email server. Personally, I think that you would be better off just not having your ISP host your mail. Sign-up with an external DNS host like DynDNS and subscribe to their Custom DNS and Mail Hop service, together that would be like $40/year. Then you can have the security of having someone else host your email (in-case your server goes down) since you have an MX backup, but you also get to configure your external DNS really easily. Then just set up the exchange server in your office, create accounts for all your users, SBS has a wizard to connect all your PC's to the domain, and then just make sure that you have a rDNS record (PTR) set up with your ISP to reverse your IP to your hostname of the mailserver.