I picked up a useful tip over at Stack Overflow today while I was trying to find out how you can install the SMTP server on Windows 7 in order to test some email functionality from an ASP .NET application.

As it turns out you can’t as the SMTP server option is no longer available from Vista onwards. This basically leaves you with two options:

  1. Install a third party SMTP server
  2. Modify the System.Net section of you web.config as detailed in this post: SMTP not working in windows 7 which will redirect all smtp messages to a local folder of your choice.

Neat!