I work for a small business that for years just used Microsoft Outlook and an external webhost that also acted as their email server (both smtp and pop3) for their email purposes. About a year and a half ago I upgraded their system and set up SBS2003 mainly for sharing files and messaging/calendars.
Because I was the only IT employee and there was many different problems to solve I only got to set up Exchange for internal emails and still maintaining our external webhost for pop3 emails coming from outside the office. This worked fine for the most part but we had problems with SMTP as well, since Exchange was our default account, it would route emails via DNS. However we were on a dynamic IP so a lot of servers would block our emails as being potentially spam. I forwarded our emails via verizon.net as our smarthost, however they too began to block our emails and I read that verizon doesn’t like business emails being forwarded via their smart host. I couldn’t convince the higher ups to switch over to a static IP until recently.
I eventually changed our smarthost to our webhosts SMTP server using an account we had on their. This worked fine for a long time, however then as our company expanded and we were sending lots of emails per day, we started to get blocked by our webhost because we were sending out too many emails via one IP address and we were considered to be potentially spam so I would have to then change around the settings and ports that the emails would be forwarded to for a couple of days before it would start working again.
Anyway, I just was able to convice the higher ups to move over to a static IP and I want our Windows Small Business Server 2003 to be our only server. Our webhost allows us to change the MX records to point to a different server. I want it to point to our new static IP that we’ll be getting in a week. What do I need to do to make sure that this runs as smoothly as possible without potentially losing all of our emails? Also what settings should I set up to ensure that employees can still receive emails outside via IMAP or POP3? Also are there any SMTP hiccups to be expected when I move back to routing via DNS?
This is my first Systems Administration gig and I was the first and only IT employee at this company so I’m sorry if this is a really simple question.
Thanks in advance!
