Collect Email by POP3 Remotely To Exchange - can it be done?

Hi,
I have set up a new SBS 2003 Server for a charity who care for elderly
people, the vast majority of users are in the same building and connect to
their email using Outlook and the Exchange server option. There are however
a number of satellite buildings in different towns and villages who also use
the same email domain. They are not connected to the main server or to a
local server, but operate small workgroups using the name of the town they
operate from.

Often the staff in the main building want to send emails to the remote
workers who use the same domain. Because the remote workers are not in the
main building (we didn't set them accounts up on the server), if a user in
the main building sends to one of their colleagues at the remote sites, they
get an error back from the Exchange server, correctly reporting that there
is no account of that name to deliver to.

My reaction to this scenario would be to create accounts on the server in
the main building and then change the remote user's Outlook to connect to
the main server and pull their email down from that, either by POP3 or by
IMAP rather than how they do currently by going directly to the ISP's mail
server.

Is this the best method, or would this community recommend another method?

The key issue is that the remote staff are reliant on relatively slow
broadband connections and also I don't want to hammer the broadband
connection on the main server which is an 8mbps line but needs to also cope
with around 30 users internet access as well.

If POP3 or IMAP are the way to go, what ports need opening up on the router
so that they can access it and do they need any special connection other
than the IP Address of the server?

Thanks for your help.

Siv

 

If they have XP and you have a license for them (they need outlook 2003)
then RPC / HTTP is the route..

Just connect to server via RWW and you will have the steps for configuring
Outlook remotely with all the settings in a link. Only point that is not
clear is to add the certificate (IE7) manually to the first folder in the
list.

Hope this helps

 

I have managed to get this working as follows:

1. On your router redirect port 110 to the server's IP Address.
2. Start the "Microsoft Exchange POP3" Service (Note: Not this is not the
POP3 Connector), set it to "Automatic" so that it always starts up when the
server is rebooted.
3. Create accounts for all the remote users who want to collect email from
your exchange server via POP3. Keep a note of the user names and passwords.
4. On each remote user's email package, set the POP3 server to be the IP
Address of your server or its Web Domain name if you have it configured on
the web.
5. Enter the "logon user name" and "password" using the user's log on that
you have created for the accounts set up in step 3 above.

E.g if your real web domain is xyz.co.uk, and your exchange server is at
87.43.92.125 and you create a user called Bob.Smith with a password of
"xyz?1234ABC", Exchange will create a mailbox called "bob.smith" and his
smtp email will be . On Bob's Outlook settings at his
remote location, set the pop3 server to be 87.43.92.125, set the logon user
name to be "bob.smith" (exclude the quotes) and his password "xyz?1234ABC"
excluding the quotes. His SMTP server would need to be the SMTP server
provided by the ISP through which he connects to the internet.

Hope this helps anyone else trying to get this working.

Siv