Sunday, March 25, 2007

SMTP In Vista (or not)

I'm dual booting my laptop between Vista and our corporate Windows XP SP2 build. On my XP build, I've installed the SMTP service to enable me to send mail on the road. I've had some problems with my existing supplier, and I was looking for a better answer and there it was as part of XP. I installed the SMTP service, and after a bit of configuration, I have it setup to send mail and not to act as a relay agent. This is working great.

I then booted back to Vista after several days using XP, and went to add the SMTP service to my Vista install. But It's not there! The service was removed in Vista's version of IIS 7.

In the meantime, I've found a replacement, a nice shareware SMTP service that works under Vista. This is the 1st SMTP Server, a shareware program. It works free for 30 days, then dies with the ongoing license costing US$49.

The package is small to download (1.2MB for the zipped version) and the installation is trivial.  See the 1st SMTP Server home page for more info on the product.

Once installed, the working  set is around 9.2mb at start, but it grows. The initial handle count also seems quite high (116) and it grows too. Not sure if this is handle or memory leaks, or  just a program getting started. I'll watch the performance over the next day or two. 

It's a shame that the SMTP feature was dropped from Vista. Maybe MS will consider adding it back in SP1. Although by that time, I'll have licensed the 1st SMTP server!

 

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