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
Much appreciated. This post was helpful to me. Same issue. Same solution!
Thanks for this very informative post. It prompted me to check for ‘Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)’ (smtpsvc) under Tools/Services in Server Manager (WS 2016). It was actually listed, and hence easy to set Startup = Automatic under Properties, so maybe this has been updated since you first looked. (I won’t know for sure if this is successful until after the next restart this coming weekend, but I am oprtimistic.)