Looking for advice on some restructuring please. We need to take full control of our mail. Currently, our MS Exchange 2003 pulls outside mail from ISPs mail server via ExChangePop3 application (http://www.exchangepop3.com/), which is installed on the same box. We would like to discontinue ISP mail hosting service, remove ExChangePop3, switch to SMTP, and let our Exchange talk to the world directly. What is the best way to accomplish this? Any advice you could give would be very much appreciated. Thank you!

As long as you have a static IP address, this is a fairly easy change. Setup an A record in your own domain pointing to your static IP address (mail.example.com). Verify the SMTP virtual server has no restrictions on what can connect, anonymous is enabled, recipient filtering is enabled. Test with Telnet from an external machine (ie not Exchange). http://exchange.sembee.info/network/telnet-test.asp Confirm not an open relay etc. Then open port 25 and test from outside the network. When you a ready, change the MX records for your domain to the new A record. Do not touch anything else. Within 48 hours or so you should find no email coming in through the POP3 service. With that, disable it, then monitor the POP3 mailbox/es for email for another week or so to ensure nothing is going there. Simon. Simon Butler, Exchange MVP Blog | Exchange Resources | In the UK? Hire Me.

As long as you have a static IP address, this is a fairly easy change. Setup an A record in your own domain pointing to your static IP address (mail.example.com). Verify the SMTP virtual server has no restrictions on what can connect, anonymous is enabled, recipient filtering is enabled. Test with Telnet from an external machine (ie not Exchange). http://exchange.sembee.info/network/telnet-test.asp Confirm not an open relay etc. Then open port 25 and test from outside the network. When you a ready, change the MX records for your domain to the new A record. Do not touch anything else. Within 48 hours or so you should find no email coming in through the POP3 service. With that, disable it, then monitor the POP3 mailbox/es for email for another week or so to ensure nothing is going there. Simon. Simon Butler, Exchange MVP Blog | Exchange Resources | In the UK? Hire Me.