Configuring Outgoing Mails from Windows Sharepoint Services

 

Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 supports both outgoing and incoming mails.

·         Outgoing Mails for email alerts. Users can subscribe to email alerts for any kind of content modification.

·         Incoming Mails for submitting content to Sharepoint directories like lists etc via email.

This article shows how to configure Outgoing emails for setting up email alerts.

From WSS point of view the configuration for outgoing emails is quite simple but in case of real world networks or corporate networks it becomes complex to configure outgoing emails. This is mainly due to the fact that corporate networks do not have open SMTP server which allows anonymous access. And WSS does not provide option for providing credentials for passing them to SMTP Server.

Let’s first start with what all need to be done in WSS.

Start with Operations -> Outgoing e-mail Settings link in WSS Central Administration.

If you have SMTP server available which allows anonymous access, it can be directly given here. A valid email id will be required for using it as ‘From’ address. It anonymous access is not allowed, we need to provide different values which I will discuss in later part of this article.

Next go to Application Management -> Web Application outgoing email settings.

Here same details as above can be configured but at application level.

Go to Operations -> Services on Server

Make sure that Outgoing email service is running.

All the steps described above were in WSS and all that is required for configuring outgoing e-mails using smtp server which allows anonymous access.

In case such kind of SMTP server is not available and you have to configure WSS with your corporate exchange server which should have smtp service running on port 25 and should allow access with valid credentials, you will have to use the relay functionality of SMTP Service which comes with IIS.

Here are steps which need to be performed.

Make sure you have IIS and SMTP service installed on same machine as WSS or another server which you want to use for SMTP relay.

Right-click on Default SMTP Virtual Server and go to Properties.

Go to Delivery tab and click on Outbound Security button.

Mention the credentials and type of authentication which your exchange server / smtp server supports.

Press on the Advanced button to mention the exchange server details.

Now mention the name of this machine in WSS configuration we did at start of this article instead of directly mentioning your exchange server details there.

That’s it. We are done. :-)