Enable and configure the 'send e-mail to list' for the MOSS / Office Demo setup

A lot of people have read and used the setupguide I keep online on this blog for a DEMO / development setup of MOSS. Although this installation works great it does not include the configuration of the 'send e-mail to list' functionality.

This week I was doing another MOSS development course at a clients office and because of company policy I wasn't allowed to plug into the network to get on the Internet. So….every time the students had to work on their labs I had plenty of time to delve into all sorts of problems still open….including the fre&^%@king 'e-mail to' possibilities 🙂

Setting this up for a normal environment isn't that hard, but if you followed my setup guide you don't have exchange installed and the SMTP server is already configured for normal e-mail traffic from sharepoint to (and between) clients. Since this is a standalone setup, I'd like it to work without network cables attached to the computer 🙂

This post describes what you need to do to get the 'send e-mail to list' functionality up and running on your installation.

1. Install a second Microsoft Loopback adapter to Windows 2003 and assign it an IP-address in a different range then the already installed loopback adapter.

2. Start the DNS management console and add a new A record pointing to this e-mail address. I used smtp2.moss.contoso.com

3. Add another A record which directly points to the IP address of the first loopback adapter. Here, I used smtp.moss.contoso.com

4. Add a new MX record, give it a name (I used 'sharepoint' to get a FQDN of sharepoint.moss.contoso.com) and use the smtp2.moss.contoso.com as the mail server.

5. Create a folder in c:inetpub to host the incoming mail. I called this folder SharepointSMTP

6. Start the IIS management console, right-click on your server and select 'New', 'SMTP Server'

* Assign a name, press Next, select the IP address you assigned to the second loopback-adapter

* Select the folder you created in step 5 as the home directory for this smtp server, press Next

* Use the FQDN name of the MX record as the domain name for this server (sharepoint.moss.contoso.com)

7. Open the Sharepoint Central Administration and go to the 'Incoming e-mail settings' section on the Operations tab

8. Set the 'Enable sites to receive e-mail' option to 'Yes' and select 'Advanced' for the settings mode

9. Select 'No' for  the Sharepoint Directory Management Service

10. Use the FQDN name of the MX record in the 'Incoming e-mail server address' (sharepoint.moss.contoso.com)

11. Use the dropfolder for the second SMTP server as the e-mail dropfolder. In this case c:inetpubsharepointsmtpdrop, give the app-pool account of the Central Admin here 'modify' rights to this folder!

12. Make sure the outgoing e-mail settings for MOSS have smtp.moss.contoso.com set as the SMTP server.

That's about it…all you need to do now is enable a list to receive e-mail in it's list-settings and send an e-mail from outlook to this address. If all goes wel, you can see a .EML file dropped in c:inetpubsharepointsmtpdrop which is picked up by the Sharepoint timer service. This service will parse the 'To' field in the e-mail message to determine the list it needs to add this message to.