I am trying to set up Exchange Server 2003 at home to receive e-mail from btopenworld and then to access the mail through microsoft outlook on my XP Proffesional computer.

The POP3 Server is mail.btinternet.com port 110

The SMTP Server is mail.btinternet.com port 25

I have spent ages looking at the microsoft site to try and find an easy start guide to setting up Exchange Server to send and recieve e-mails accessible through outlook, but just end up miore confused! Can somebody help please.

Your exchange server should have an external IP address so that email can be forwarded to it by the ISP, it's called an MX Record (Mail Exchange Record).
You should just setup Outlook / Outlook Express to pull from the mail server and bypass Exchange.

Exchange 2003 has this neat wizard when you try to configure it that will walk you through all the settings you need to make it work.

To do Exchange, you install Exchange and do the domainprep which mixes Exchange into AD. From there, you need to install your Exchange Tools so you can administer it. Open up the.. I forget the name of the tool.. Exchange something.. it's 3 words if I remember..

From there, you can click on the exchange server name, which would be the local PC, select to run the Wizard. The wizard should walk you through setting up an external IP address and etc. etc.

You need the external IP address in Exchange.. Your ISP will forward any request to that IP address, which you can have route through your router to push towards that computer.

Exchange is easy to setup, a pain to administer. It's hard to understand unless you sit there and actually walk through it.


But in your case, you don't want to use exchange, you want outlook or outlook express (if you prefer microsoft products).

This link should help you out.. I really suggest following the Check List provided when installing Exchange..

http://www.techtutorials.info/2003exchan.html


Riser

Thanks Riser for your reply which was helpful as I have now entered the MX record in DNS and ran the Internet Mail Wizard in System Manager. I still do not understand how to configure Exchange to receive mail from btopenworld, can you help me here. Am I right in thinking that I need to put the btopenworld SMTP Server name in the internet Mail Wizard.

Also when I am running the Internet Mail Wizard, it informs that I cannot send messages with it being a Bridgehead server, how can I resolve this?


Thanks.

If the mx record is pointing to an external IP which the exchange server is either using, aliased to, or has the correct ports forwarded it should simply pickup any mail that comes to it.
Adding an MX record could take up to several days to fully propogate throughout the internet. It might work itself out.

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>

Normally I contact my ISP to propogate my MX Record. Since they are an ISP and have contact with all other ISP through one or two other companies, it gets spread real quick.

Forward Port 25 on your Router to your Exchange server.

What's the external IP address of your Exchange server?

Test it to make sure it's working:
In dos, Type NSLOOKUP
That should return some information on your server.
Type Microsoft.com

What's it return to you?

It should give you a bunch of info on Microsoft.