Exchange, Outlook and Firewall

Exchange 2003, outlook 98.
Local clients connect with no issue,

I have had internet clients connecting via exchange connector thru the
firewall at thie location before with no issue, until code red came out...
and due to an unqualifed admin and/or a patch issued by microsoft, this has
stopped working.

Ports open on the firewall: 25,80,110,135,143,593 and opened range 1024 to
1800 based on something I read.
The exchange client "sometimes" connects to check the username with 10
second pause, othertime it reports connection or network error.

I have statically set the tcpip ports for exchange as well based on some
articles posted by microsoft, saw no improvement and removed them.

I am 5 hours into this...what have missed to get this to work?

Craig Musgrove
MCSE, MCP+I, MCP

Lanwench
Wed Jan 26 20:00:13 CST 2005

Craig Musgrove wrote:
> Exchange 2003, outlook 98.
> Local clients connect with no issue,
>
> I have had internet clients connecting via exchange connector thru the
> firewall at thie location before with no issue, until code red came
> out... and due to an unqualifed admin and/or a patch issued by
> microsoft, this has stopped working.
>
> Ports open on the firewall: 25,80,110,135,143,593 and opened range
> 1024 to 1800 based on something I read.
> The exchange client "sometimes" connects to check the username with 10
> second pause, othertime it reports connection or network error.
>
> I have statically set the tcpip ports for exchange as well based on
> some articles posted by microsoft, saw no improvement and removed
> them.
>
> I am 5 hours into this...what have missed to get this to work?
>
> Craig Musgrove
> MCSE, MCP+I, MCP

Oh my - you really are asking for trouble. You should close nearly all those
ports. You should have the following open, if needed:

TCP 25, for inbound SMTP
TCP 443, for OWA via SSL/HTTPS (don't open 80)
TCP 110, if external access to your server via POP is needed

If you have external clients who need to connect directly to the Exchange
mailbox, not via POP/IMAP or OWA, you should implement VPN.