Ok first I'd like to say that although I know asp.net and vb.net fairly well
I know very little about Exchange, so please
forgive me if I sound clueless.

The sitiuation I am facing is this:
I have several ASP.NET/VB.NET Web applications running on one Win2K server
and Exchange 2000 running on my mail server(also Win2K Server). To prevent
my Exchange Server from allowing SPAM to be relayed I have checked the checkbox
to only allow mail to be relayed for authenticated users. Therein lies the
problem. The web applications (which need to send out email messages to
mail boxes on other mail servers outside of my domain) cannot send mail to
boxes not residing on my mailserver because Exchange stops the mailfrom being
relayed. I tried granting relay permission to the IP address of the each
of the seperate websites from the webserver, and even to my entire subnet;
all to no avail. I as well as my network admin have been pulling our hair
out trying to figure this out.

So my question is:
Is there any way I can login to exchange programatically in my ASP.NET/VB.NET
applications to authenticate a user so I can relay email only for these web
applications? Or is there some other way to work around this.

Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance
Jay H.