Publishing IMAP, POP and SMTP settings via Exchange 2010 OWA

/ August 31, 2010

Do you allow your users to connect to Exchange 2010 directly via IMAP, POP and SMTP? If you do then not only will some Exchange admins call you crazy…  but you’ll probably have to document the client settings such as server names, port and encryption settings somewhere and distribute it to users.

In Exchange 2010 there is actually somewhere to publish these settings – and once configured your documentation won’t need to be updated if the server details change. You’ll find these settings by logging into OWA, and choosing Options. The link “Settings for POP, IMAP, and SMTP access…” should be shown on the default “My Account” page:

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By default, nothing will be listed if you click the link:

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To configure these links, it’s a fairly straightforward process. Before you begin, you need to know what the settings should be and in the case of the SMTP settings, which receive connector on which Hub Transport this relates to.

First, you configure the Client Access servers for the POP and IMAP settings, using the Set-POPSettings and Set-IMAPSettings cmdlets with the -ExternalConnectionSettings parameter.

For each protocol you specify a colon-separated list of values for the ExternalConnectionSettings. For POP3 with TLS, this might be “casserver.contoso.com:110:tls” or POP3 with SSL might be “casserver.contoso.com:995:ssl”. IMAP with TLS might be “casserver.contoso.com:143:tls” and IMAP with SSL might be “casserver.contoso.com:993:ssl”.

Here’s a quick example of the commands against my test setup:

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Set-POPSettings -ExternalConnectionSettings "mail.contoso.com:110:tls"
Set-IMAPSettings -ExternalConnectionSettings "mail.contoso.com:143:tls"

It’s important to remember, you need to run the command on all Client Access servers users will access.

Next, you need to allow the receive connector that you want “published” to advertise it’s settings. You do this with the Set-ReceiveConnector cmdlet specifying the -AdvertiseClientSettings:$true parameter and value.

In my example, I want to advertise the port 587 “client” receive connector on my Hub Transport server:

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Set-ReceiveConnector -Identity "hubtransport\Client HUBTRANSPORT" -AdvertiseClientSettings:$true

Finally, run iisreset to restart IIS on each Client Access Server, the log back into OWA (well, ECP) and test the “Settings for POP, IMAP, and SMTP access…”  link again. It should now show the settings specified:

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For further reading check out Set-IMAPSettings, Set-POPSettings and Set-ReceiveConnector.

(Just a footnote- thanks to Jag at Microsoft for providing this information)

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15 thoughts on “Publishing IMAP, POP and SMTP settings via Exchange 2010 OWA”

  2. Thank $author! You share some great blog traffic advice, Thank for sharing all this and making it clear.enough for any one to be able to get! I’ve subscribed to your rss feed to keep up to date. looking forward to your new tips!

  3. i remember using i nice script to set it up… but don’t remember where i had found it… the script was awesome just had to tip what to publish…

  4. Pingback: Publishing IMAP, POP and-SMTP settings via Exchange 2010 OWA

  5. I just found this article by search and it was exactly what I was looking to do. Very straight forward and extremely helpful. This is helping me learn hot to setup my personal exchange server. This is my first setup do this is a big help. I’ve noticed that even my university exchange account doesn’t advertise SMTP, leaving it at unavailable. They put Access Disabled for POP which is fine. They did configure IMAP so I see how they do it.

  10. For the receive connector, do you have to set the values for External Connection Settings for SMTP in the same way as you do for IMAP and POP?

    Or, when you set the advertise client settings to True, does the value for SMTP automatically get inserted and published?

    Thanks for posting this…It’s hard to find any info out there on this setting…

    • Hi Kyle,

      The value it uses when you set advertise client settings to “true” should be automaticlaly inserted and published.

      The value it uses is the FQDN value on the chosen receive connector, as shown/set in the EMC via Server Configuration>Hub Transport>Receive Connectors, Right clicking and choosing Properties on the chosen receive connector.

      Steve

  11. Glad to see someone document this. I just got done figuring it out myself. Wish Microsoft would be as clear about this in their docs.

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