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TheShaner

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Best Pop 2 Exchange connector for Exchange 2003?

Can anyone make any recommendations?  I am currently using Pop2Exchange and it pretty much blows.  Craps out at least once a week.
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redseatechnologies
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Any reason you aren't using SMTP delivery? That is how Exchange is designed to work. POP3 connectors are evil things, I wouldn't recommend them to anyone. They are all fudges to get round the fact that Exchange wasn't designed to work that way.

I can provide a counter-argument for any reason people put up for using a POP3 Connector. Going to SMTP delivery would be your best bet.

Simon.
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Vahik

well i am also against POP3 connectors......untill a few months back i was called on a recovery...that is my main job....
complete loss of AD and Exchange.....important company,over  40 users,could not live without email....when i arrived they were already in their second day without exchange.....
On-site recovery is hard on my nerves....users and managers check on u every five minutes wanting to know when email will be back....and want to know what will happen to those emails while exchange was out and what happens to emails that were in transit and millions of questions....BUT not these folks...noone stuck his or her head in to the server room.....it took me exactly 4 days to recover everything and they did not lose a single email while the exchange was down and they were able to communicate under company address even when AD was out....HOW? because they had pop connector....which meant emails were being collected at the ISP....which meant not a single email was returned....and no one knew their server was down....and with a web access(today almost all isps provide a web base email access) they commuicated under their domain address with their clients and internal users....
it is true this had its limitations...such as no global address list....no global contacts...no free\bussy......but they had access  to the most basic and important function of an email server......being able to send  receive,reply...


small companies can not replace crashed servers over-night...they do not have money for a backup server...or a backup line....or full-time admins.....or even a decent backup strategy.......pop3 connectors should be considered and recommended as a backup and disaster recovery strategy to these folks....which i do now.....

so what was the question??? a good pop3 connector??? i think folks here covered it....it does not exist...
i was just passing through....my comments should not be considered for grading....
I totally agree with you Vahik, POP3 connectors can be usefull, but not for a long period of time.

They have helped me before :)

-red
Red... there is one more advantage in pop3 connectors.....
i wrote this recently in my broken english.....read the PS: part...

http://www.exchangerecovery.net/Exchange%20_server_disaster_recovery.html
While that is a nice story about how the POP3 connector saved that client's email, it still doesn't change my opinion of the POP3 connectors.

If you want to save the email, then it is quite simple what to do. Build a standard Windows 2003 server with IIS and SMTP and setup a relay server. Adjust the timeout on the SMTP server and you can store that email for weeks on the server. Once the Exchange server has been repaired, let the email deliver.

As I wrote above - I can counter any argument in favour of POP3 connectors.

Simon.
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The last company I worked at we managed our own pop mail through the Exchange server.  But we were just overloaded with spam attempts, which affected our bandwidth.  (It was really that bad)  So with this current company, we had the pop services offloaded to another company and just use a connector to retrieve the mail.
With recipient filtering (and tarpitting), the IMF and greylisting - your spam should be heavily reduced.

If that is not good enough, then you could look at a 3rd party application for spam.

Also, spam affects different companies differently, just because one site was almost killed by spam, does not mean that every site is.

-red
If you are using Exchange on Windows 2003 then the biggest bandwidth killer - email to invalid recipients can be easily dealt with. If you are allowing spam to be delivered then you need to look at that issue first - if the spam has been delivered (even if you are dropping the messages later) then the spammer has done their job.
Greylisting is quite effective for dealing with the spam messages.

Having the spam messages dealt with elsewhere is a common argument, but do you really want someone else deciding what is spam and what is not?

The fact that your previous company had a serious spam problem does not mean the current company does and isn't really a valid reason to use POP3 connectors. Exchange is not designed to be used with POP3 connectors and SMTP delivery is much more efficient use of bandwidth.

Simon.
I have, what I find to be, a valid reason for using a pop connector.
One of the sites I am working on has an exchange server and need to collect mail from a university server in another country. If anyone can suggest a better way of getting mail from the pop3 server to the exchange server then please let me know as I am having a fair amount of difficulty.
In an instance like that, I would be pushing for either a new subdomain (so otherlocation.whatever.uni.edu) for your site (if you have a lot of users), or even just faking the setup to simulate that (if you only have a few); http://www.amset.info/exchange/twositesonedomain.asp