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i hope you can help. I'm losing my mind. I'm not a specialist in SBS but i have a huge problem.

I wanted to replace the mircosoft pop3-connector with popcon because i was told that several mails could not be received.

So i installed popcon and stoped the services: 'Microsoft Connector for POP3' and 'Microsoft Exchange POP3'.

And nevertheless i was still receiving mails (popcon was not running at this moment).

Then i changed the email-server in the 'pop3 connector manager' and restarted all services of exchange (pop3 services still stopped) to make sure that there is no connection to the e-mail server with pop3.

But i still got mails.

Then i stopped 'Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)' and now i can't receive mails anymore.

But i also can't receive mails when i'm starting popcon. It always tells me that there are no mails on the server.

I know that behaviour when i tried to stop forwarding port 25 to this server. Then i couldn't receive mails either. Even though this is the smtp port.

Long story short: Can anyone tell me why it seems like my server is downloading mails via smtp?

I really do not unterstand this at all & I also can't find anything on google etc.

I'm thankful for any response!

Cheers

Henny
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1 Answers1

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Typical setup

  • Email for someone@example.org goes to the server mentioned in DNS, the MailExchange (MX) record, under the domain example.org
  • That email is carried by SMTP.
  • If that entry in DNS is pointing to the Exchange server then incoming email is coming in via SMTP and you do not need popcon.

It's also possible to have this kind of arrangement:

  • DNS MX records for example.org point to a hosting company server.
  • Email goes there by SMTP.
  • The hosting company delivers it to a mailbox somewhere and holds it.
  • A POP3 connector connects to those mailboxes, gets the email, then puts it into Exchange as if it was new email
  • Exchange delivers it to a local mailbox and holds it there.

It looks like you have the first setup, but you think you have the second.

Long story short: Email probably is arriving over SMTP, and that's normal and good.

Visit a site like http://mxtoolbox.com/ and enter mx:domain.com (use your email domain name), and that will tell you the servers that other people will try to deliver email to. If it comes back with your SBS server's public address, email will come in to your SBS server via SMTP.

TessellatingHeckler
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  • Thanks this helped a lot. Can you tell me how i delete my Server from the MX records so that i can receive the mails via the second setup? – Henny Mar 08 '14 at 13:27
  • Your domain name is registered with some company, and you need to go to that company to change the DNS records. Put the domain name into http://who.is and look for the 'Registrar Info' info. They might have a control panel to login to and change it, or ask their support. Your domain must have *an* MX record so people in the wider internet can find how to send email to you. If you delete your server and leave the MX record empty, email to you will stop working completely. You would need to change it to put another server instead. Which other server? Whichever company you pay to host your email. – TessellatingHeckler Mar 08 '14 at 14:39
  • Thanks a lot, again! There are three entries of type MX (one of them is my server, the others are from my mail-provider) so i guess my mail-provider receives the mails and i can download them via pop3 when i delete the MX Record of my server. things are getting clear now :) thank you so much! – Henny Mar 08 '14 at 16:24
  • That sounds OK as well. (Having more than one MX record is intended for a backup route, so if the first one doesn't answer quickly enough people can send mail to another instead). You probably can remove your server's MX entry and leave the other two. – TessellatingHeckler Mar 08 '14 at 16:28