Ron, the installer will stop and start the MailService.exe. While it is not necessary to manually stop the service, my internal testing has found that the installer is slightly faster if the service is already stopped before performing an upgrade. You may also want to bounce the AppPool associated with SmarterMail, though the installer also does that depending on the option selected in the IIS configuration tool.  You do not need to restart the entire server after installation.  The installer does say you may have to if it detects the service running when you try to do an upgrade, another reason I personally stop the service before doing the upgrade.  Regardless, a server restart is not required.

We always iisreset /stop, then stop the SmarterMail service, wait for all of them to go down. Uninstall SM, reboot the server, iisreset /stop again to shutdown IIS, install the new version of SmarterMail, then we have an a custom executable that polls port 25 until it responds, then starts IIS back up.

 

We simply do it out of habit as well as to give the server a fresh start along with SM.

I always reboot a server after the uninstall, before the install of a new minor build. I don't restart after the installation.

This is the way we proceed, both for minor and major versions (unless there is another recommendation for a specific version):

1. Back up!

2. Stop SM service, IIS and WWW Publishing

3. Uninstall SM

4. Reboot whole VM

5. Install new version of SM. After finishing all dialogues, log into an user account and an admin account for the SM installation, just to check it`s up and running

6. Reboot whole VM

7. Log in again into SM as admin and check the domains.

8. Log in as user and send test mails to and from external accounts at major providers. View the source of the messages sent from SmarterMail using 3 major mail providers (Outlook.com, gMail.com, Yahoo.com) and check for anything suspicious.

9. Perform the mail tests at: https://mxtoolbox.com / https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com/ / http://dkimvalidator.com/ / https://www.port25.com/authentication-checker/ / http://www.checktls.com/#test (test TO: / test FROM:)

10. In case of errors, check logs, etc

 

We never had any issues with the upgrade process itself using this method (which is usually done on a Sunday or Saturday evening). The server on which the VM sits is quite fast, so points 2-7 are done in 5, or max 10 minutes in extreme cases (e.g. server also had some updates pending and it was waiting for a reboot). Of course, maybe if we had tens of SM servers, it would not be so easy to do this whole process with all of them.