Creating an IIS Smarthost relay

IIS can be easily and quickly configured to use a High Deliverability, Anti-Abuse relay service such as the  MailChannels Outbound Filtering platform. 

Step 1: Ensure SMTP  is installed on your Windows host

This guide depends upon the underlying SMTP service being available on your local Windows host.

1. Consult your Windows version documentation and if not already present, install and configure SMTP according to the software developers recommendations.

Step 2: Setup a Smarthost

Authentication is required where possible and the SMTP credentials used in this guide are fictitious and must be altered to use your own SMTP information on an active MailChannels Outbound Filtering account. If you have reached this page and do not yet have valid SMTP credentials please sign up or contact our Support Team if you need us to recover them.

1. Access the IIS Manager and right-click on the SMTP virtual server. Choose properties from the menu.
   
2. Click on the Delivery tab, then click the Advanced button.
3. In the Smarthost textbox, add: smtp.mailchannels.net
   
4. Click the Ok button to set the Smarthost name and then click on the Security tab.
5. Choose Basic Authentication if not already the default and enter your MailChannels SMTP credentials into the Username and Password textboxes and click the OK button to complete your Smarthost setup.

Fixing Issues

MailChannels supports connections to alternative SMTP ports for Outbound Filtering. Using the following additional step you can configure your Smarthost relay to use 2525, 465 or 587 should 25 be inaccessible to you for any reason.

Step 1: Configure IIS to use an Alternate SMTP port

1. Access the IIS Manager and right-click on the SMTP virtual server. Choose properties from the menu.
2. Click on the Delivery tab, then choose Outbound Connections.
   
3. In the Outbound Connections popup window, change the TCP Port textbox value to your desired SMTP port and click the OK button to save the new value and complete your Alternative SMTP port setup.