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Although they might not surface every where you want them to such as incoming emails on a straight "custom list" or list created from the custom list template. There are some extremely useful scenarios and if you know you want to do it, one of these lists might work for you. Once you've configured your server for inbound email you'll notice that on the following lists and maybe some I don't list you can enable including:
(Thanks Eben and April for bringing this important topic to the top of the list.)
Here's some suggestions/scenarios:
1) The best place to archive emails is on the discussion list, much better than the document libraries for most scenarios. Document libraries are really designed for e-mail attachments only (there are some options in the list/document library settings to manage what to do.) Discussion Boards integrate e-mail content into SharePoint providing rich support for threading and filtering.
2) Imagine putting your list as a member of your team discussion group (DL) and having it either show up on a discussion list, an annoucement list, or event list for calendar view.
3.) Form libraries can also be email enabled. Use InfoPath to make the submit button of the form e-mail the form to the form library, you can now submit forms from anywhere.
4.) Note you can also e-mail enable the announcement list and your blog. This makes it easy to post new announcements on your team home page or post blog posts to your blog.
What I don't recommend:
Don't put it on a high volume DL, you still have the limitations of the list views.
An attachment with a blank body may be rejected according to a user email and was reinfored by their call to support.
MS IT has been very cautious about their support for email enabled lists and specifically only supporting it on few isolated environments...
Why Not?
Email enabled lists create contact objects in AD, it takes careful coordination to create these contact objects and ensure the proper write access to a specific OU. Imagine 500,000 lists all with the ability to be email enabled. There are also some huge wildly popular DLs. That's a lot of freedom. If you're not ready to manage it, I agree with the mentality of start small, understand the implications. You don't need to turn on all the nobs, and start with everything enabled, but for some scenarios this feature alone is really the *killer* feature. When you create a site it doesn't automatically create these objects, so you don't have to worry about that, in fact most will never even know it's there. It would take some training to learn how best to take advantage of these features, but they are cool and very powerful. When you delete a site, it does clean up these objects, but what happens when a site is deleted without the API or when a database is simply removed down the road. That's right, unless the API is called properly you could end up with some contact orphans. Naming standards for these objects? No control really unless you build something. So there are some considerations to be aware of.
I did a post a while back on comparing Exchange public folders to email enabled lists. There isn't a 100% overlap, and that's what this post discusses. There are some great scenarios where more and more the scenarios can be moved to SharePoint, but I don't recommend blindly moving everything from email to SharePoint. If you're using your PF for a file server and team calendars, then there's likely something here for you.
TechNet has a couple resources on the topic:
Steve Smith wrote the paper that has been to as the nearly authoritative info on How to configure Incoming Email Enabled Libraries in MOSS2007. It's my favorite, and I refer people here whenever the topic comes up. It's true that email enabled lists is an option in WSS 3.0 not just MOSS 2007.
Want to compare it to another blog post, this SharePoint blogger Code and Stuff shares their configuration steps and testing validation.
This amusing email came in today from a SharePoint PM which shows how we're dogfooding and enjoying our own product. "Our product is cooler than I thought. The review list is actually subscribed to the “Windows SharePoint Services Specs” alias… so if you just send your mail to that list, it’ll get automatically added to the list. Wow ;) SharePoint rocks!"
Here is my killer scenario for using an email enabled discussion forum.
How many public web sites do you see the “For sales enquires contact us mailto:sales@blablabla123xyz.com (blablabla actually exists, so i didn’t want to get them added to spam lists)
And where does that email go? I often ask customer this question and they always say “to a shared mail box or DL”. So who knows when someone has dealt with the enquiry? How do assign the enquiry to someone based on the appropriate subject matter expert? How can you analyse the type of enquiries you receive?
I guess you can see where I’m going with this. Have the email go to an email enabled Discussion group. Add a few metadata columns and throw in some workflow.
The only tip I have if you are going to implement this sort of solution is to ensure you have some good spam filtering before the email gets to SharePoint!
I haven't seen much discussion on this, but can you talk about practical limits, best practices, etc., as regards capacity constraints using SharePoint infrastructure as an inbound email repository (either active or as part of a records maintenance system)? I shudder to think of potential problems with scaling when I consider how much large mailboxes torture Exchange (which perhaps has a better fit-for-purpose as a message repository in addition to its MTA functions). Or are my concerns overblown?
Thanks!
Joel as a informative article about some of the pros and cons of email enabled lists in MOSS 2007.
http://www.gilham.org/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=14
Después de algún tiempo sin postear el habitual recopilatorio de recursos interesantes de WSS 3.0 &
There is growing interest in using email-enabled lists in SharePoint...not a lot of enterprise examples
I wonder if there might be a way, without creating a custom workflow solution, to allow users subscribing to alerts in a Discussion list to get emails from the list email address (vs the default MOSS/WSS email account) in order to allow users to simply reply back to the email and have it add to the discussion.
A big issue we currently have with users running discussion boards is that people frequently mistake a message as from someone, and automatically hit reply. This results in the email being returned to the system account. Not helpful for the discussion.
If you are looking to automatically integrate emails into your SharePoint portal solutions you should check out our new web part which we are looking for test installations for.
Our web product is called Email-Manager(tm) and it enables you to integrate emails in your portal in a matter of minutes. Emails (send and received) on the exchange server are automatically captured and store in a SQL database. Via our ready made web part (you can also use our SDK and acces our web services directly) you are then able to incorporate the emails into you team site (including attachments etc.)
We also give away the source code for you to do even further developement and customization to the product.
The product is in beta right now, but is already installed in many live environments - we are looking for more test installations, so if you are interested please let us know.
Check it out on www.oppsol.com and there is a recorded demo here: http://emmdownload.com/sharepoint/
Kind regards
Kenneth
Is there a way to populate custom list columns with information provided in an email?
Sure, we'd like to have inbound eMail working because it can do alot for corporate communications
We are currently developing an email enabled list system for gathering documentation such as Time off approval, HR forms, incoming invoices etc. In our situation only 25% of the employees have access to company computers 75% just don't need computers for their job, So how to collect such required paperwork.
Email enabled lists combined with a fax to email server will allow employees to:
•Email from home computers if they have one
•Email from copy scanners in the remote offices if they have one
•However all offices have fax machines so all employees can fax their paperwork to a fax number that forwards to an email enabled list.
We then configure workflows to move the documents from the incoming fax libraries to the correct libraries such as HR forms or incoming invoices, where other workflows will start the actual work process.
We can also use this configuration to replace the departmental incoming fax machines with departmental incoming fax SharePoint libraries.
My question is this; when reviewing the contact items in AD how do you find the library that receives the incoming email?
Is there any way to produce a list of email enable lists from SharePoint?
I have started adding the library URL to the description field of the contact but since we have many users who can email enable lists it is very difficult to discover the library from the information in the contact.
Also when an email enabled list is configured to only accept emails from users with contribute rights the sender does not receive a non delivery report (NDR) from the SMTP or MOSS server.
In the case of incoming faxes I don’t think there is any way to notify the sender of rejected submissions but if anyone has any ideas please let me know.
This is quite a useful feature of SharePoint if you would like to start a K2 process based on the retrieval
Is there a fix for the Body of the email issue? I have run into this and wondering why it is a problem!
I am not getting this to work following the basic scenario. We have enabled both the server and the list and added a new email within AD. I can verify when an email is sent to the new address by checking the mailbox, but nothing is showing up in the (announcement) list. In our case the email is simply in the format 'randomname@domain.com'. Within the directions they refer to smtp address as part of the email address. Is there anything special that has to be done with the email address?
You may want to try this solution
http://anurasoftware.com/default.aspx
Anura Email Enabled List for SharePoint 2007
Anura Email Enabled List extends the ability of receiving incoming emails to all types of SharePoint list. Microsoft SharePoint 2007 limits this ability by only allowing receiving incoming emails by Document Libraries, Announcements list, Calendar list, Discussion board and Blog list. Anura Software helps you to remove this limitation and extends this ability to all your selected lists, such as task list, issue tracking list, and any custom lists.
Anura Email Enabled List also contains outgoing email features which can send confirmatoin and notification to email senders. This is useful for building SharePoint based issue tracking system. Please read Build A Email Enabled Issue Tracking List.