Introduction

Mail services publishing is the most popular type of server publishing. Both small and large organizations prefer to have a higher level of control over their mail services than any other type of service. Why? Since most businesses are highly dependent on their mail services, they can little afford the foibles and inconsistent levels of service provided by third parties. If mail services go down, they might take the business with them!

The good news is that Microsoft's Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server makes publishing mail services very simple. If you have your own third-party Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)/Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3) mail server, you can use the Microsoft Internet Information server (IIS) SMTP service for a mail relay, and you can even leverage the IIS SMTP service and the ISA Server Message Screener to protect your third-party SMTP/POP3 mail server from spam. If you run Windows 2003, you already have a POP3 server available to you. Just put an IIS SMTP service in front of your Windows 2003 SMTP/POP3 server and you'll be protected against attackers and spam.

Even more impressive than support for simple IIS SMTP services is ISA Server's ability to make Exchange 2000 services available to Internet users. You can publish all the Exchange Server's mail services, or just certain ones. ISA Server integrates with Exchange 2000 by making it easy to securely publish Exchange Remote Procedure Call (RPC) and Outlook Web access (OWA). No other firewall on the market provides this...