Installing BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express on a Small Business Server 2003 Premium (SBS 2003) is not as easy as it looks. The documentation from BlackBerry is not complete and difficult to understand. I have decided to write documentation with all screenshots for this installation. My customer has an excisting SBS 2003 Premium SP1 (not R2) so we will install a new SQL 2000 named instance and create a BES service account that will run the BES software.

 

This document assumes that you have downloaded the Black Berry Enterprise Express software from the BlackBerry website. Before we can install the BESExpress software there are several things we need to do on the SBS 2003 Server. Most import step is that we create a BES service account that will run the BlackBerry Enterprise server.

Because of the release of the iPhone, there has been an increase in interest in configuring IMAP and POP3 services on SBS servers. In this author's opinion, providing access to e-mail via IMAP is better than POP3. The approach of IMAP more closely emulates how Exchange provides e-mail services in that messages are maintained on the server, and the IMAP client only pulls down what is needed. There are still security issues with IMAP, however, in that the default protocol still transmits the username and password information across the internet in clear text, and even though fewer sniffers are trained on IMAP ports to try and discover account credentials, the risk is still there.

 

To help protect account credentials, as well as e-mail contents, IMAP can be set up over SSL, which encrypts the entire transaction process, not just username and password. The iPhone and other devices can be easily set up to use IMAP over SSL, but you have to first set up the Exchange server on SBS to provide the secure mail transport. This document covers this implementation with SBS 2003 and ISA 2004. A separate document has been created for the process to follow with SBS 2003 Standard.

Because of the release of the iPhone, there has been an increase in interest in configuring IMAP and POP3 services on SBS servers. In this author's opinion, providing access to e-mail via IMAP is better than POP3. The approach of IMAP more closely emulates how Exchange provides e-mail services in that messages are maintained on the server, and the IMAP client only pulls down what is needed. There are still security issues with IMAP, however, in that the default protocol still transmits the username and password information across the internet in clear text, and even though fewer sniffers are trained on IMAP ports to try and discover account credentials, the risk is still there.

 

To help protect account credentials, as well as e-mail contents, IMAP can be set up over SSL, which encrypts the entire transaction process, not just username and password. The iPhone and other devices can be easily set up to use IMAP over SSL, but you have to first set up the Exchange server on SBS to provide the secure mail transport. This document covers this implementation with SBS 2003 Standard and no ISA. You will need to configure your firewall to forward the appropriate ports to the SBS server, which is beyond the scope of this document.

A smart host is a type of mail relay server which allows an SMTP server to route e-mail to an intermediate mail server rather than directly to the recipient’s server. Often this smart host requires authentication from the sender to verify that the sender has privileges to have mail forwarded through the smart host. This is an important distinction from an open relay that will forward mail from the sender without authentication. Common authentication techniques include SMTP-AUTH and POP before SMTP.

 

Some ISPs, in an effort to reduce e-mail spam originating at their customer’s IP addresses, will not allow their customers to communicate directly with the recipient’s mail server via the default SMTP port number 25. In this case the customer has no choice but to use the smart host provided by the ISP. A growing number of systems also verifies the sending system against known lists of cable modem and DSL networks and will not accept SMTP connections from these systems to reduce the amount of incoming spam. Field test have shown this can have a sizable impact on the number of spam messages one receives and it is expected to become more and more common. Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_host. In this article we will discuss the following issues and scenarios: