Retrieving mail (very newbiefied question)

[TwitchyTheTramp]

On Friday my boss asked me to look into something in Exchange 2000. I've never used exchange before or know much about it at all. He is trying to set up Exchange so that it downloads email to the exchange server from the internet and then clients can download this from exchange (which from what I gather, in its most basic form should be very straight forward). The part about downloading to the clients from exchange seems straight forward enough from what I have picked up about it. It is the part about initially getting the mail on to Exchange that I cannot find any information on. Its probably staring me in the face but I cannot see it. Could anyone give me some very simple pointers as, as I mentioned before, I have never used this before.

Thanks for any help in advance,

Nick

 

[MrsKensington]

The easiest way of recieving mail is through SMTP (Simple Mail transport Protocol). Exchange Server justs sits listening at a port on the server for any mail fired at it. This has some draw backs.
You need a static IP Address (on the internet) as the mail has to be fired at something, also if you have a dodgy connection and it goes down you wont be able to get to the mail that has been fired at it until the connection is back up. We had this problem as our ADSL is quite unreliable and we often have to connect through ISDN (damn BT!)
If you get your mail currently from a POP server then you have a small problem. Exchange 2000 has no support for POP3 (please tell me if im wrong) but there is a simple way round it. You can get POP3 to SMTP "converters". What this does is connect to the POP server download the mail and fire it at a port at a specified IP address. This IP Address would be your Exchange Server.
We have this program actually on our exchange server and it basically fires the mail at itself (suicide you may think !!)
I know of two of these programs. GetMail is a freeware program that is very simple to set up (took me 10 mins) but as its free there is no support so you'll be doing that! POPWeasel is a slightly more advanced and therefore took a bit longer to setup (about 20 mins) but as you have to pay for it you get support (someone to pass the buck to when it all goes wrong).
Hopefully that may help. Ford? There's an infinite number of monkeys outside wanting to talk to you about a script of Hamlet they've produced!!