Last Friday morning my business line went dead, taking the broadband connection with it. I reported the fault and resigned myself to using dial-up for a day or two. Then I started to wonder how my SBS 2003 customers would be affected if they were to lose their broadband connection for period of time. Could they, at a minimum, still get their emails via Exchange? This seemed to be a good time to find out.

In my test SBS 2003 system I installed and tested a dial-up connection via Network Connections. This was just to ensure that the modem, drivers and connection details would all work for that machine. I then ran the Configure Email and Internet Connection wizard and took the Dial-up option on the Connection Type screen. What then becomes apparent is that SBS 2003 sets up its own dial definitions and doesn't use those in Network Connections. It also doesn't give you a choice of modem, but instead just appears to use the first one that it finds in the device configuration. The next screen allows you to switch on the firewall, which clearly you should do.

Several screens further on through the wizard you get Mail Schedule. As far as I can see in this scenario this dictates how often Exchange will dial, but I ran out of time to fully investigate this. Perhaps someone can provide more details on this mechanism via a comment. There also doesn't appear to be a means of manually telling SBS 2003 to connect or disconnect, but again I would welcome an update on this.

Anyway, with these definitions in place email could successfully be sent and recieved, so that was encouraging. By Monday afternoon my broadband connection was back, which as a great relief.