Disabling Services - Back End Server

I've seen a few queries recently on whether it's a good idea to stop and disable certain services, such as the Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP) service, on an Exchange 2000 server. After all, there are quite a number of services installed with Exchange 2000, but not all of them are required for core functionality. Stopping and disabling these services may not only free up valuable resources for the required services, but it's also good security practice.

Here I list the services that are candidates for disabling on a mailbox server. Remember to evaluate them for your environment.

Microsoft Exchange IMAP4 - Unless you plan on using IMAP4 clients, there's not much point in enabling this service.

Microsoft Exchange POP3 - As per IMAP4.

Microsoft Search - This service isn't required for core functionality, since it is used by the full-text indexing process.

Microsoft Exchange Event Service - Required for backwards compatibility with Exchange 5.5 event scripts. Therefore, if you've never used Exchange 5.5 event scripts, you might as well disable this service.

Microsoft Exchange Site Replication Service - This service will be disabled by default on most servers. It's required when coexisting with Exchange 5.5, and is required on the first server installed into an Exchange 5.5 Site.

Microsoft Exchange MTA Stacks - You'll need this service if you're coexisting with Exchange 5.5 or if you have X.400 Connectors configured on your Exchange 2000 server. It's also used for move-mailbox operations, so if you ever need to move users between servers and storage groups, you'll need this service running.

Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP) - Although this service is required to be installed prior to installing Exchange 2000 itself, it doesn't have to be running for core functionality. Of course, if you require newsgroups to be available within your public folder hierarchy, then that's a different story!

In the not too distant future, I'll look at what Exchange services can safely be disabled on a front-end server.