Enabling POP3 in Exchange Server 2007

As Terry Myerson posted on the Exchange team blog not too long ago (read previous post titled " Exchange Server 2007 SP1: A bag of goodies!"), the Exchange Management Console will get POP and IMAP management - amongst other features - in Exchange Server 2007 SP1.

Till then, the shell is the only option to configure these.

I'm not in love with POP, but surprisingly, many environments and organizations continue to use it, preferring it over IMAP4 - which is a better protocol according to many folks. For some reason, users seem to like it as well - perhaps because it's a simple, "no-frills" protocol that lets users fetch their mail using a number of different clients available for almost every flavor of operating system you can think of.

By default, the POP3 service (Microsoft Exchange POP3, or MSExchangePOP3) is set to start manually. To enable POP3, the service should be set to start automatically from the Services.msc console, or from Exchange shell using the following command:

Set-service msExchangePOP3 -startuptype automatic

Setting the service to start automatically takes care of starting it when the computer is restarted. For the current session, you still need to start the service from the Services console, or from the shell:

Start-service -service msExchangePOP3

The default authentication type on the POP3 "virtual server" is set to SecureLogin. The other options: 1) PlainTextLogin and 2) SecureLogin. The login type can be changed (to plaintextlogin in this example) using the following command:

Set-POPSettings -LoginType plaintextlogin

For more details on the authentication types, refer to "Configuring Authentication for POP3 and IMAP4" in Exchange Server 2007 documentation. (Thanks to Evan Dodds for the pointers... )

Next, binding POP3 to a particular IP address. By default, POP3 is bound to all IP addresses. To bind it to a particular IP address:

Set-POPSettings -UnencryptedOrTlsBindings "1.2.3.4:110"