sending email to sharepoint

skelley

22 Aug 2007 4:33 AM

Comments 6

sharepoint v3 has the new feature of sending email to sharepoint lists.

cool right?

there is even a built in sharepoint list template called "discussion boards" which is ideal for incoming emails, and acts as a threading tool for grouping messages together.

this is handy for a lot of reasons but one potential usage of emailing to sharepoint could be archival storage of team discussion groups or Discussion Groups / Security Groups (DGs / SGs).

to setup DG archiving to sharepoint, here is a quick overview of what you'll have to do:

install windows smtp server component in the control panel on your sharepoint web front ends (not installed by default)
next, enable incoming email in sharepoint central admin > operations > incoming email settings
- configure settings as per your environment
create the sharepoint list for incoming email
- when creating the list be sure to check the "allow incoming email" box
get the list's email address. it'll be something like listname@sharepointfarm.yourcompany.com
create a new AD contact object
- set the SMTP address of the contact object to the above email address
add this contact object to the DG / SG as a member and all future emails will be distributed to sharepoint as well

pretty sweet right? this can all be automated as well with some not too complex code.

now before you start going email crazy there's a couple of concerns to consider first.

lists in sharepoint are supposed to remain under 2,000 items (being returned to the view). you'll need to consider that you'll likely hit this limitation quickly, as some email DGs can get more 2,000 mail items in only a few days (or less).

ok fine.. i'll admit it...

in sharepoint technically you can have more than 2,000 items in a list... you could even have millions.

the key is that you need to ensure that the view you are using for displaying the list, is not returning any more than 2,000 items.

as an example, setup the default view of a list to filter for the last 7 days or something which you know will always have a result set of under 2,000 items. the rest of the items can be found by searching, which is likely what people will do anyway. whose gonna browse a list of thousands of items?

so that is one consideration. ensuring there are default views which limit the items displayed for all email enabled lists.

another issue is storage. most companies have lots of DGs and if all of a sudden they're going to sharepoint you'll run out of storage the first day!

that's why you'd need to figure out a rollout plan. slowly scale up and watch how much space is needed.

of course, this should all be tested in a lab first too, to get some ballpark estimates of how much space is required for 1 email message, how many messages sent on average per day to this DG, etc...

hey sean, what about legal ramifications?

many companies are starting to adopt (or have already) some type of retention period setting for old emails. lawyers don't want any extra documents around that could be used against the company as soon as they become inadmissible in court. i think emails minimum retention period are 1 year (unless its business critical) but i'm not a lawyer, and that depends on your organization.

the bottom line is, you're gonna want to consult your companies' lawyers and find out what their policy is. sharepoint allows you to set policies on sites to expire content after a certain period of time so that is pretty much exactly what you'll need.

now you could do this for every site collection programmatically, but what if admins of the site just go in there and turn of the policy?

so are you going to run this policy setting application nightly on a timer to always ensure all sites have the correct settings?

another whole issue to deal with.

there are plenty of things to think about, but sending email to sharepoint is a really cool feature and i imagine this will only gain popularity in the future.

in a future post (and my team's upcoming book MOSS for Architects and Engineers) i'll cover some more in depth / best practice configuration settings for exchange and sharepoint to get incoming email to sharepoint working.

-sean