I started out with IIS and a 3rd party smtp/pop server on my desktop. Problem was, I'd go away for a few hours and come back to a tower beaten into submission by someone who found ports 80, 25 and 110 open for use. These are the ONLY ports open for use to the internet. I'm sort of new at this, but instead of trying to figure out what was going on and fix it I devoted my time to something else and gave up. Well, not I have that time back and I'd like to figure out how to accomplish what I wanted to do in the first place: run web and mail services on my tower without getting slammed by port sniffers who'll bash my computer to hell and gone all the time. Am I living in a pipe dream, or is there really a way to do this without spending huge amounts of cache?

I use a DLink wireless switch/router with a built in hardware firewall. I'm running WinXP Pro with IIS installed, and I was running a mail server called "The Email Sever". All of this was running on a DSL connection and I set up my DDNS dealy with dyndns.org. I'm using AVG's AV, and Zone Alarm for my software FW on the tower.