SharePoint 2007 - Incoming Email - "From the Field"- Neil Thompson - Site Home

There are many little "gotchas" with setting up incoming email for MOSS. Just nit picky little things, normally they are all about email infrastructure, SMTP, etc. My advice below is to help you avoid taking your heart medication, it can be easy to set this up, but it can also be a hair pulling, eye rolling, staying up all night and getting no results kind of affair as well.

I promise, this technology does actually work, but if you deviate from the standard build (see list item 3 below for "standard build" as defined by me) you will fall off a cliff unless really understand what you are doing.

I'm not an exchange guru, just a humble BizTalk/Moss guy.

Don't just do this trial and error and play with settings until it works. It won't work. Be deliberate and intentional, setup the standard way and then slowly change things, each time checking to see if the forwarding still works.

This is where I recommend you start, read all this stuff first, before you race off back to your Virtual Machines.

Plan incoming e-mail (Office SharePoint Server) <link updated - August 2009>
Configure incoming e-mail settings (Office SharePoint Server)<link updated - August 2009>
In addition to the technet site, a very good place to start is

Read these documents and set it up in a lab exactly as described until it works
Now introduce incremental changes to the infrastructure and after each one, verify that email is still getting through, or not.

Gotchas and Advice

Trust me, for the first run, just make the FQDN of the moss server (SMTP server) the same as the @domain that you are trying to send to

Clarification
AD domain = example.com,
moss server name = MOSS2K7
moss FQDN = MOSS2K7.example.com
email domain = MOSS2K7.example.com
example address = myemail@moss2k7.example.com
Trust me, for the first run, start off by actually allowing MOSS to own an OU and manage it's own contacts, don't be a cowboy and hope to configure them manually on the first try.
Just do everything the default way the first time, use a lab environment if you have to
Use the OWA website on your lab email server (or a local instance of Outlook conntected to that server) to send emails around, don't try to hook-up external MX-Records and send from external emails.
Keep and eye out for .eml files showing up in the Queue folder on the MOSS box. This is a sign that the SMTP server is forwarding them elsewhere and that is a sign that there is a fundamental problem with the email coming in. Most likely the SMTP sever does not recognize that it is the utlimate destination for emails with that @domainname address.

If you try to read from the SMTP queue on the MOSS server, you will get

A critical error occurred while processing the incoming e-mail file C:\Inetpub\mailroot\Queue\NTFS_cab371a601c8166600000011.EML. The error was: The process cannot access the file 'C:\Inetpub\mailroot\Queue\NTFS_cab371a601c8166600000011.EML' because it is being used by another process..

The solution to this is "DON'T READ FROM THE QUEUE". If the emails are in the SMTP queue on your Moss server then your email/smtp settings are probably messed up. (Perhaps you did not take my advice on keeping the FQDN of the MOSS server the same as the @domain name that you are sending mail to?)

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If you try to "drag and drop" from queue to the drop folder manually, you will get

A critical error occurred while processing the incoming e-mail file C:\Inetpub\mailroot\drop\NTFS_db489bee01c8166600000012.EML. The error was: Bad senders or recipients..

Don't tell me, let me guess. You copied the .eml files from the Queue folder to the Drop folder and then saw sharepoint delete them. Same point as above, If the emails are in the SMTP queue on your Moss server then your email/smtp settings are probably messed up. (Perhaps you did not take my advice on keeping the FQDN of the MOSS server the same as the @domain name that you are sending mail to?)

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