Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 : Email Integration (part 1) - Configuring Outgoing Email

SharePoint relies on outgoing email messages as the primary notification method to SharePoint users. SharePoint also allows you to send email to lists or libraries. Both Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server support these outgoing and incoming messages.

In this section, you'll learn how to configure SharePoint to enable outgoing and incoming email.

1. Configuring Outgoing Email

SharePoint sends email messages for a number of reasons. One is for the alert engine with SharePoint. For example, if a user is assigned a new task, they will automatically receive a new message. Related to this, users can also create an alert that allows them to be notified when an item in a list or library has changed. We covered how to do this using Outlook in the previous section.

SharePoint also sends out other notifications from time to time. These may go to SharePoint administrators informing them that a user is requesting access to a particular website. Another common example is when a quota warning in a site collection has been exceeded. Users can also receive an email notification if they have been granted access to a website.

Configuring the SharePoint portion of outgoing email is fairly simple and can be done using Central Administration. When configuring outgoing email settings, you have the option of configuring it for all SharePoint web applications or individual ones. To configure outgoing email for all web applications, first click the Operations tab, and then select the Outgoing Email Settings link in the Topology and Services category. To configure a single web application, click the Application Management tab, and then select Web Application Outgoing Email settings. In either case, the settings screen will look like Figure 1.

As you can see, the settings are straightforward. For Outbound SMTP Server, you can specify an IP address or any name that can be resolved to an IP address. For the email to be encoded in a different language, you can adjust the character set, and this is one reason why you might want different settings per web application.

To list all the SMTP servers that you are using for outgoing email, you can select the Operations tab and choose Servers In Farm. On the resulting screen, you'll see all the servers in your farm and their services. Among the list, you'll see each server that you have configured as an outgoing email server.

SharePoint Farm Within SharePoint, the term "farm" is used frequently and has a specific meaning. A farm consists of all the SharePoint servers that share a single configuration database stored in SQL Server. Servers in the farm communicate with each other using this configuration database.

Figure 1. Configuring outgoing email

While these settings look easy to configure, there are some important implications you should be aware of. First, since you can specify only one SMTP server per web application, you may have a single point of failure in delivering email. That is, if the SMTP server is down or if SharePoint cannot deliver to TCP port 25 for any reason (for example, a firewall is blocking), all outgoing mail for this web application will fail. If email delivery is critical, consider a load balancer for your SMTP services.

Another consideration is that SharePoint does not have the ability to authenticate to the SMTP server. This means the SMTP server must allow anonymous connections. Assuming that SharePoint is pointing to an Exchange server for mail delivery, the best solution is to create a new connector in Exchange that allows anonymous connections. The new connector should then be configured to only accept connections from the SharePoint web servers.

If your security policy does not permit you to configure your existing Exchange server to allow anonymous connections, there is a workaround. On one of your SharePoint web servers, you can install and use the SMTP service that is part of IIS. You configure your outgoing email settings to deliver to this server, and this server would then authenticate to your Exchange server and forward the messages.

One final item is that you must ensure that your Exchange server (or designated SMTP server) allows relaying from your SharePoint web servers. Since a message may originate from any web server in your SharePoint farm, you must ensure that all these hosts are marked as valid.