Take the 2-minute tour ×

We had smarter mail installed, but it kept wiping/corrupting all our email. This was problematic to say the least.

Anyway, finally we decided to move and are now using Gmail. We have all our DNS setup and are using Gmail just fine! It's brilliant and we love it.

We then uninstalled Smartermail.

Now we have a couple of mailing lists, some with just over 2,000 people on them. We can use Gmail to send mails out, but this exceeds the 2k daily send limit.

Is it possible to install another SMTP program on the server to send mail? We don't want to receive, just use it to send. I'm a bit clueless as to what to do here, we're using ASP.net and C#, can we use our server to send email without going through Google?

share|improve this question
You can use the built-in SMTP virtual server with IIS. Pretty sure that still comes with IIS 7.5. –  gravyface Jan 7 '12 at 0:59
@Gravy thanks, that's what I was hoping for. How do I get the details of this server? As in, what do I specify in place of smtp.google.com when I want to send an email? –  Tom Gullen Jan 7 '12 at 1:05
add comment

3 Answers

You probably could, but it depends. Does your internet have a static IP? If so, what i would suggest doing one of the following:

  1. Outsource your mailing blasts (highly reccomend)
  2. Setup postini for both inbound and outbound filtering. Then you can send mail through postini The added bonus here is you get better spam filtering. You's still need to setup a Windows 2008 SMTP server, but at least it won't be your server doing the sending to the outside. You'll basically send mail locally through your server to Postini, and then postini will deliver it to your recipients.

If you need further direction, let me know.

Here are basic instuctions for Windows 2008 SMTP setup. http://www.itsolutionskb.com/2008/11/installing-and-configuring-windows-server-2008-smtp-server/

Here is a link to Postini http://www.google.com/postini/index.html

share|improve this answer
add comment


First add SMTP server by right clicking Computer and pressing Manage. Go to add features.

Once that's all setup, send an email as follows:

    MailMessage mail = new MailMessage();
    SmtpClient SmtpServer = new SmtpClient("localhost");

    mail.From = new MailAddress("xxx@xxx.com");
    mail.Subject = "Test Mail";
    mail.Body = "This is for testing SMTP mail from localhost";
    SmtpServer.Port = 25;
    SmtpServer.EnableSsl = false;
    SmtpServer.DeliveryMethod = SmtpDeliveryMethod.PickupDirectoryFromIis;
catch (Exception ex)

It's important to specify delivery method as pickup from IIS or it will not work. This doesn't seem to conflict at all with anything else we have on the server.

Also important to note the SMTP service will be set to "Manual" you will probably want to set this to automatic.

share|improve this answer
Yup, pretty much. One thing is that there's a difference between sending mail and sending mail consistently and reliably. You're going to want to setup SPF records and reverse DNS at a minimum. –  gravyface Jan 7 '12 at 5:30
@Gravy argh this doesn't make much sense to me, how important is that? And do you have a link to an article at all explaining in more detail? One thing that's nice, this code seems to send 2k emails in about 3 seconds, when we used smartermail it would take a few minutes. –  Tom Gullen Jan 7 '12 at 10:35
It's so you don't look like a spammer. –  gravyface Jan 8 '12 at 4:58
add comment

By GMail I hope you selected Google Apps rather than GMail for individuals.

I had a similar problem to you.

If your server has R-DNS, static IP and is secure, you can use http://www.hmailserver.com/. It's really easy to manage.

Otherwise I'd highly recommend you migrate your mailing lists to http://mailchimp.com/. It's free under some circumstances, will automate your SPF & Bounce Backs and is really easy to use.

The other option is to turn on Google Groups for Business inside Google Apps. Groups acts similar to mailing lists and any e-mail you send to the group will be forwarded to everyone subscribed.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Your Answer


