Changing the default port of an Exchange Server Send Connector

This post is going to cover the process involved in specifying a port other than the default (port 25) for the Send Connector in Exchange 2007 and 2010

Why would you want to?

Perhaps you have a SPAM or Virus appliance that requires you to send it mail on a different port number.  Or your ISP requires that you use a different port when forwarding email to their smarthost.  There are a number of different reasons why you would want to do this, most of which are designed to combat the ever growing SPAM problems.

In previous versions of Exchange, this change was fairly straight forward. We would just create a new SMTP Virtual Server and assign it the appropriate port.

With Exchange 2007 & 2010 there is no Graphical User Interface (GUI) to do this for us so we must use the Exchange Management Shell.

We first need to find the identity or name of the send connector.

The name of the Send Connector can be found in the Exchange Management Console under Organisation Configuration > Hub Transport > Send Connectors.  Alternatively you can run the following command in the Exchange Management Shell:

Get-SendConnector | fl

This will display the details of all send connectors.  Look for the line where the identity is specified.  We will need this in the next command.

To make the change to the port number, we must run the following command:

Set-SendConnector -Identity "Send Connector Name" -port 28

This command will set the port to 28.

The section of the command identified by the switch -Identity "Send Connector Name" needs to be the name you obtained from the Get-SendConnector command you issued earlier on the Exchange Management Console.

Further Reading
For further information regarding SMTP Virtual Server please see: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997301(EXCHG.65).aspx

For further information regarding Send Connectors please see:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998662.aspx