Technical Help Centre - Gconnect - The Business ISP

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SMTP Mail Collection (Feed) SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) is the method by which mail is transported from one server to another. Whereas with POP collection the mail transport is effectively terminated at our POP servers, with SMTP delivery, the mail is directed directly to your server. There are many suitable office mail servers available, but by far the most popular in the SME marketplace is Microsoft Exchange.   -   -   -   -   -   -

How does it work? Gconnect simply point the primary MX record for your domain at an IP number (for the purists amongst us – via a CNAME). The IP number should be attached to your mail server either directly or through port forwarding. Obviously the IP needs to be static and publicly routable. One of the common methods of doing this is to use an ADSL line with a fixed IP. Of course, even with Gconnect’s ADSL service there is a small chance that the ADSL may malfunction temporarily, or your mail server falls over, or in fact one of many possible scenarios that would prevent your mail from being delivered. So in order to prevent the email being bounced to the sender, we provide a store and forward service, whereby one of our mail servers will accept mail for your domain if your server is unavailable, and try to deliver it periodically for around seven days. If your server is still not available, it returns the message to the sender. This is achieved by a secondary MX record which points to our server. What’s so great about an SMTP feed then? The main advantage is that the mail is ‘real time’, i.e. the mail comes directly to your server and lands straight into your mail box. POP account users have to wait for the next scheduled POP collection. In addition older versions of MS Exchange don’t support POP collection and the only way to get mail into the box is via SMTP. So why doesn’t everybody want SMTP mail? The short answer is that the overhead in both cost and knowledge is far greater than other methods. SMTP servers need to set up so as to avoid being open relays, the connection to the internet needs to be almost always on and the connection needs to be bigger, as filtering is non existent until it hits the server. Exchange servers are one of the targets of hackers and spammers and identifying them is not difficult. It should be noted, that a correctly configured Exchange server is very secure and provides a wealth of groupware and individual functionality, this is not an anti Microsoft rant.