Thanks for the reply. Here's my situation. We have an smtp mail gateway on a node in our network (non-windows node). We have several nodes/servers that send and receive mail - not just Exchange. We currently route all outgoing/incoming mail through the smtp mail gateway. So the gateway works with our internal DNS to route mail to specified nodes. Bottom line, we don't exclusively use Exchange for mail. What we don't want to do is send all mail through the Exchange server and use the connectors in Exchange to route mail. We want mail to come in/out of one node/server and have that server route to the node/server. This node/server will be either AIX or Windows node/server. The current node is a Compaq/HP node and will be retiring soon. I was going the direction of using Windows 2003 SMTP services, but I keep hearing Windows is not robust or secure enough to be the SMTP mail gateway/router. Comments? Deb