Our set-up looks like this:
To receive email:
[[Our e-mail host]] --> POP3 [[Our Exchange 2003 server]]
To send e-mail:
[[Our Exchange 2003 server]] --> SMTP --> [[Zen internet]] --> [[[email protected]]]
Is the above set-up the way to go? Is it best practice to host your own exchange e-mail system? (we receive a lot of SPAM and many of the products only work when mail is retrieved via SMTP)
We are a small sized company of about 20-30 mailboxes - we use many of the Outlook 07/10 features such as meetings and calendars - I say this because I read that IMAP doesn't support this (I was looking at all possible options).
So my real questions are:
So what are the main differences between POP3 and Exchange?
Is it worth us switching over to Exchange hosted when we do an upgrade to SBS 2008?
Apart from two (is that correct?) public IP addresses, is there any other 'special' requirements?
Would it be safe to open up the Exchange server to the public internet? (of course, opening up anything to the outside world is dangerous, but will it be fine if set up properly?)
Is there anything else I have not thought through properly? The main reason I want to do this is because I don't think that retrieving our e-mail via pop 3 from an external provider is how it's supposed to be done. Also, I do not believe we are making full use & flexibility of Exchange 2003's (or 2010 when we upgrade to SBS 2008) features by using POP3.