Phillipus Gunawan wrote:
Hi There, I just been asking by manager to deploy a POP3 connector for winblow$2008 with exchange 2007 The company been using winblow$2003 and moving to 08 with exchange 2007 What would be a good friendly package to integrate it with AD which will deliver the POP email to its mailbox in the exchange user We had a firewall / adsl gateway Debian installed, hoping can be use for this purpose Tried to do googling but see no light and need it bit urgent Any comments or docos link will be much appreciated
I use fetchmail on Debian into an SBS2003 without problems. Why do you want AD integration? This can be done to some extent with Samba at 2003 level, but I'd assume MS has put some more roadblocks in place by now. You can do it yourself with authenticated LDAP access to the Windows server, but I don't think that will be quick to set up and debug. Exchange will only accept mail for its own users when so configured, fetchmail doesn't need to know about them, though it helps in spam reduction.
If it's SBS2008, then like 2003 it has a POP3 downloader built in, and unlike 2003, it allegedly works tolerably well. I'd still use fetchmail. All POP3 downloaders except the SBS2003 POP3 connector deliver to Exchange by SMTP, taking advantage of some of the anti-spam techniques in Exchange. The SBS2003 POP3 connector is 'integrated', a joyful Microsoft marketing term meaning that it doesn't use a clean interface. It actually drops the mail straight into the Exchange mail store, thus bypassing a number of possibly useful filtering mechanisms.
I'll give you the usual SBS newsgroup lecture: POP3 is a poor method of collection of business email as it sends passwords in clear text and doesn't (without help) do BCC and mailing lists. Fetchmail and most third-party downloaders can use extra headers to deal with BCC and mailing lists, if the POP3 host is adding them. If you collect domain-wide, rather than configuring the downloader separately for each user, you must either use a catch-all spam trap or generate NDR spam. Even with AD integration in the local network, the SMTP server at the POP3 host has already accepted mail to anybody. Also, if you're collecting domain-wide, some users get irritated by the multiple copies of those emails sent to more than one person in their domain. Another joy of POP3.
SMTP is the way to go, even with Exchange. I haven't yet had anything to do with Exchange 2007, but I'd be surprised if it was anywhere near as flexible in configuration as a *nix mail server. E2003 certainly isn't. You might want to set up exim4 or another SMTP server of your choice to actually face the Internet, as it will probably do a better job of spam reduction than Exchange.
Also, whether you go POP3 and fetchmail or SMTP and exim4, you can make use of SpamAssassin, ClamAV and other filtering software before passing the mail on to Exchange. Nothing improves email in a Windows network like a Linux server...
-- Joe