I'm going to have my website hosted soon on a VPS or dedicated server (with Windows 2008), so I'm trying to plan ahead. I wonder whether the built-in SMTP server that comes with IIS7 is reliable enough for a production server or should I look for an alternative? I heard good things about hmailserver and best of all it's free, do you have any experience with using the bulit-in SMTP on a high traffic website.
Thanks a lot for any suggestions
Maybe sending it via gmail is a good one :P
Ok serious. IIS7 seems I heard to have some decent improvement. If that's not doing it, I guess you could try free stuff like mailenable.
(No I can't find the evidence on the improvement on IIS SMTP, people who know about this please comment)
Long term you might end up split it to a linux based smtp though, that gives you some flexibility on server farming if it goes too insane.
And if its for any kind of mass mailing that might trigger spam server blocking, don't ever try to host it together with your other important stuff- you want to keep yourself have a back step if your server gets blocked.
Being on windows, your best choice will probably be IIS.
If it was Linux, I'd suggest postfix.
you haven't mentioned if you are needing to receive mail, or just to send it. One of the best all around solutions for a windows mail server is IpSwitch's iMail (http://www.ipswitch.com/), but it costs.
If you mainly need to send mail, then your best bet is to use an upstream smtp server.
IIS smtp services are, in general, not useful. If you use Exchange, it gets a bit better, but still not very efficient, and not the most secure by any means.
At work, we used to use the SMTP server in IIS 6.0 for years and it was perfectly fine.
Eventually, we just simply didn't want all the issues that come with running your SMTP server so we mapped our MX records to a third-party service and moved on with our lives.
It's not actually that bad an idea to map your MX records to a third-party provider, like Google. It's one service less to configure and one service less to patch.
I hit this thread via Google but I was looking for an outbound only SMTP server for transactional emails (customer registration confirmation etc. but not marketing), then some things I discovered are:
SMTP does still exist in Windows Server 2008.
Server Manager > Features (not Roles) > Right-click, Add > SMTP Server - then Configure IIS 7 SMTP to point to the local server.
Then use the Framework to do the business: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.mail.smtpclient.aspx
Jango have a paid for but cheap enough service for exactly this kind of thing. The Free account only allows 200/month but might be useful for some folk.
http://www.jangosmtp.com/Pricing.asp
Good luck!
Depending on your volume and whether you are using this for bulk email for either large volumes of transactional messages or marketing/newsletter should determine your course of action here. If have small volumes and are delivering email to primarily corporate domains then IIS on Windows is probably fine. If you have larger volumes and are sending to commercial addresses like Yahoo or Hotmail then you need a more intelligent SMTP server that knows how to properly throttle email to those domains without getting into trouble. You would also need something that supports DKIM signing as this is important to the likes of Yahoo and Gmail. One great server in this category is SocketLabs Hurricane MTA Server. It is a Windows-based server with full .Net integration available to customize the server and track bounces, complaints and even opens and clicks. - https://www.socketlabs.com/products/smtp-server