Windows Vista has been out for a while, but I never got a chance to use it much. The main reason is that I don’t have a test machine  to run Vista and I don’t have budget to upgrade my current machine either.

Finally, I found a computer in my office that has not been used by any other people, so I grabbed it as my test machine. Also Windows 7 Beta is out, so I just skipped Vista and installed Windows 7 on this test machine. Everything works fine until today when I tried to test a Visual Studio 2008 web application with some email features then I realized I don’t have IIS or SMTP installed. No biggie, I thought I can just install IIS and SMTP as I did with Windows XP, however, I could install IIS without any problem,  but I had trouble installing SMTP on Windows 7. After searching on the Internet, I realized that started with Vista, Microsoft stopped including SMTP in the OS. Well, it explains why I could not install SMTP on Windows 7 but it also drives me crazy: without SMTP how can I know if my mail function is working?

After some more search, I found that the best solution is to install a third-party SMTP server on Windows. So far I found two free SMTP servers recommended by other developers:

Steve Schofield recommended to use Free SMTP Server (http://softstack.com/freesmtp.html)

Another person recommended in a forum to use hMailServer (http://www.hmailserver.com/)

Both look very promising and I will give them a try to see how it goes.