I recently installed the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) feature to Windows Server 2016. Everything seemed fine until I discovered that the SMTP service does not start automatically on system re-boot. Furthermore, the service is not listed under the Services management snap-in. Operating the SMTP service via the IIS Manager 6.0 manager manually works just fine.
This situation can be remedied at the command prompt using ‘sc’. i.e.
sc config smtpsvc start= auto
Note that there is a space between the parameter ‘start=’ and the value ‘auto’. This is intentional and all name/value pairs need to be separated like this.
All being well, a confirmation will be displayed:
[SC] ChangeServiceConfig SUCCESS
This does not solve the problem of the SMTP not being listed under the services management snap-in. If anyone can shed any light on that, please leave a comment.
I do know that the display name for the service is ‘Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)’. This can be confirmed by executing:
sc getdisplayname smtpsvc