How to disguise your SMTP Greeting/Banner in Exchange 2003

I do this for any customer I run into (and then shift into reverse and run into them again :). Why advertise you are running Exchange 2003 SMTP? You don’t want to make it easy for the bad guys.

So, do this…
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/836564/en-us

To change the response that appears when you connect to an SMTP virtual server, follow these steps: 1. Click Start, and then click Run.
2. In the Open box, type cmd, and then click OK.
3. Change to the Adminscripts directory.

The Adminscripts directory is located in the following location:
Drive:InetpubAdminscripts
4. Type the following line, and then press ENTER:
cscript adsutil.vbs set smtpsvc/vsi number/connectresponse “Your Text”
In this line, vsinumber is the number of the SMTP virtual server, and Your Text is the text that you want to appear instead of the default response.
5. To complete this procedure, stop and then restart the SMTP service. To do so: a. Type net stop smtpsvc, and then press ENTER.
b. Type net start smtpsvc, and the press ENTER.

6. Type exit, and then press ENTER.
Now, when you connect to your SMTP virtual server TCP port on a Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 computer by using a connection such as Telnet, the connection response that appears uses the text that you specified in step 4.