Windows Server - converting from POP3 connector to SMTP

[feenster99]

Hi all,
I'm looking at changing our organisation over from a POP3 connector setup to receive mail via SMTP.

Can anyone give me a step by step guide as to what needs to be done to make sure we don't loose any mail? I'm guessing at the least, i'll need to change our MX records to point to our (static) IP address (do I change both MX records, or leave one pointing our Web hosting?). I'm happy setting up Windows Server to receive the mail properly, but I remember reading that I need to setup a PTR record with our ISP. Is this correct?

Cheers,
Matt

 

[Ole Ftang]

All you need to do is get your mx record pointing at your static IP, route port 25 traffic through your firewall to the mail server and you should start to recieve mail once the isp has chaged their mail feed to smtp. You can test it with a telnet on port 25 to your external ip from outside the network.

type telnet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx 25 at a command prompt and you should get a reply from the mail server (xxx etc is your external ip by the way).

Before you do anything check with your isp what their policy is on email regarding the amount of time they keep is bouncing around before dropping it as undeliverable. This is usually aboout 9 days so you shouldn't need to worry about losing mail as it all comes flooding in once the new setup is done.

PTR records are not really necessary but you should look into spf records as these are becoming more important. If you send mail to addresses such as aol then their servers do an spf lookup and if they don't get the right answer the mail is rejected.

Don't know about your second mx record and the web hosting bit, would need more info on that to answer.

 

[feenster99]

Hi,
Thanks for the reply.

I thought the reason for the PTR records was so that if your internal mail server was down, the mail would be bounced back to your ISP, who would hold it for a set length of time. Otherwise, how would the mail know where to be routed to if the internal server was down? Also, do you need to setup Exchange in any way to check the ISP's mailserver every so often, or is just pushed to you automatically?

Cheers,
Matt