Dear Friends, I am working in an NGO best vocational training institute based in Pakistan. As this is a charitable organization so try our level best to save every single penny we can. We are procuring softwares from Microsoft and being a charitable organization we are being offered 70% to 90% discount from Microsoft on various products. I am also procuring Microsoft Exchange Server 2008. Currently we are using free mail hosting service from google but now I want my emails to be hosted on my Exchange server we will get our server placed in an ISP. I have a few queries: Do I need to have a third party pop server or Exchange server can itself act as a POP3 server? The same question goes for SMTP, although SMTP can be configured via IIS but still I would like to ask if there is any option of configuring SMTP in Exchange? I don't want to use Exchange as a distribution server like the emails are present at some mail server and exchange downloads the email from the mail server and then it just distributes it. I want the emails actually to be hosted on my Exchange server, manage email accounts through exchange like creating/deleting email address and the users shall be able to retrieve their emails directly from exchange via pop3. Please guide me if these tasks can be performed with Exchange Server 2008. Regards, - Fahad.

I believe you meant Exchange 2010 on Windows Server 2008? Not sure if you are looking at SBS 2008 which is great value and product for Windows 2008 and Exchange 2007 for less than 75 users. To answer your questions: 1. No, Exchange uses SMTP as native protocol although SBS 2008 does include POP3 Connector. 2. SMTP is preferred. 3. Look at MSExchange.org which has some great articles for configuring hosting your own Exchange Server. As I stated above, if you choose to go with SBS 2008, it includes many helpful wizards that will walk you through setting this up.MVP Exchange Server