We have an Exchange server in my office with a few dozen accounts. Emails sent to <anything>@mybusinessname.com are collected by a catchall POP3 account on an external web server. The Exchange server is set up to check this POP3 account at regular intervals, download emails, and distribute them to the relevant inboxes. My question: Would there be any benefit in bypassing this external POP3 account, and getting email delivered straight to the Exchange server? What is common practice?

I definitely recommend getting email delivered directly to your Exchange server and bypassing the POP3 service. The only reason to keep them is if they are doing message hygiene (SPAM and AV) for you and you don't have anything set up in your environment. You didn't mention what version of the Exchange. The steps are different depending on the Exchange version. Exch 2000/2003 are similar and Exch 2007/2010 are similar. Let me know what version and I can give you some guidelines.Tim Harrington - Catapult Systems - http://HowDoUC.blogspot.com

For such a small office I do not recommend going straight to the Exchange Server. I would recommend that you use a hosted Spam / AV Solution to smarthost your mail. Tons of my clients try to set this up themselves and run into issues with Reverse Lookups and have to battle with the ISP's. It is just not worth the effort for a small office. The cost of hosted SPAM / AV - Via Appriver.com is .75 per user per month. or you can use Microsoft's solution. This is what your configuration would look like: Email flow would look like this. 1. Sent from External Client 2. Route to Smarthost - ie. Appriver or Microsoft 3. Srub for AV / Spam 4. Smarthost to your HUB or Edge Server 5. Delivered to Mailbox. You could remote steps 2 and 3 -- But honestly I have had so much success with my clients that I don't even give them an option of having the email come directly to them any longer. Hope this helps, Thanks, Dave Kawula Principal Consultant TriCon Technical Services Inc. www.triconts.com dkawula@triconts.com www.insidetheregistry.com