Receiving mail is a whole different beast than sending mail. If you're in a corporate environment, you should ask the mail administrator which are the recommended ways of doing this. Otherwise, the following article[^] implements a simple pop3 server with eventing. You could do something similar. The point is that internet mail is distributed through smtp servers. In order to receive mail from the internet, you need a public domain name, MX records in you domain DNS, and a fixed IP address. If you can't do that, you'll have to register a mail address with a free mail provider (or with your ISP). You can then access that mail through the POP3 protocol(all providers), the IMAP protocol (some providers), or something else (for example MAPI) Your best bet is pop3, after you've registered a mail address. I've found a pop3 class library at Codeplex[^], you may wanto check it out