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.
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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.
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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.
