Incoming Email In SharePoint

Last week I was at a client's re-installing SharePoint for them and I was just about done (or so I thought) when I came to the point where I needed to configure incoming email. For anyone who has configured incoming email you probably feel my pain. For those that haven't configured incoming email, this post will definitely help you. Incoming email can be really simple or it can make you want to rip your hair out, depending on how many Exchange servers and Spam filters are between your SharePoint server and the Internet.

I began my configuration by going to the incoming email settings in Central Administration and setting the install to allow incoming email and setting the incoming mail server (which was the local SMTP server on the SharePoint box). I left most of the other default settings and moved onto a list to allow incoming email on that list and give it an address. In the back of my mind I knew there was an Exchange server that I needed to work with so I wanted to make sure that email that would reach the SMTP server on the SharePoint box would deliver the emails to SharePoint. I did this by sending an email from Outlook Express on the SharePoint server and watching it get delivered to the SharePoint list. I was satisfied with that so I wanted to remove the email enabled part of that list. When I went to do that I got a wonderful SharePoint error that said 'Error in Application.' I knew from previous experience that this error usually means that there is not the right permissions on the Active Directory OU that stores the accounts created by SharePoint, so I checked with the client to make sure that the service accounts had the right permissions and they did. This puzzled me. What else could be causing this error. I found a blog post that had a couple of documents, one for configuring incoming email with Exchange 2003 and one for Exchange 2007 (since much has changed with 2007). The Combined Knowledge site contains links to those documents (which are invaluable).

I noticed that in the document for Exchange 2003 it stated to make sure that the account used for the web application that you want to email enable needs to be using the same service account as the one that is set for the Central Administration web app. I was pretty sure that mine was, so I searched for some other options online. After search for another 2 hours, I decided to double check to make sure that accounts were the same. They were not, but once I made them the same, the error went away on the lists. So now I was feeling confident that I was almost done.

I had the client test the email enabled list by sending an email from their Outlook and the emails were bouncing back. I helped them configure Exchange to relay emails to the SMTP server on the SharePoint box. This got emails from internal users into the lists. Since I was not internal to their network I tried sending an email to the list and it kept bouncing back. After thinking this over, the client and I determined that there was another server that external email was being routed through first, so we configured that server to relay to the SharePoint box and then I was able to send emails to the list.

After spending 9 hours on a task that I thought would take an hour or so, I was once again humbled by SharePoint. If you find yourself needing to configure incoming email with either an Exchange 2003 or 2007 server follow the Combined Knowledge articles. They are well written and include a troubleshooting section for those times that you run into an issue. If I would have followed them right away I would have saved a few hours of my day.