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Where to place SMTP server on network?

I'm looking at building an SMTP server for our office. We have about 20 users who will be using it. A few questions here: 1.) Where on the network should it go- seems like we want it behind the firewall, but won't this make it so laptop travelers can't see it? Don't really want to force people to VPN just to send POP mail. 2.) Will the configuration (end-to-end Vs. Relay) affect where the server is placed? Relay seems like the way to go from behind a firewall, but do we need to manage a system on the other end to receive the relay or can it just relay out to other systems on the 'Net that we don't have anything to do with? Not sure I completely understand the functional difference between the configurations. 3.) may either do Mercury/32 on a Windows XP machine (don't have any seats of Server left) or Sendmail over Fedora. Any opinions there? As you can tell I've never configured an SMTP server but I have net admin experience and have administered Exchange before. Thanks for any input. Thanks for the answer. We will soon have a Server up running 2008 standard. I was under the impression that IIS only came with the web version of windows server. I don't really want to open port 25 to incoming traffic because of the potential for spammers to hijack the SMTP server. Thanks.

Public Comments

1. It must go behind your firewall. Are you actually running Windows Server anywhere? If you are, it's built into IIS 6.0 which is part of the standard build. (I've put in a link to the MSDN site which takes you through it step by step). Once that's all up and running, you can just open a port and viola, everyone can see it.