Our company recently migrated to an externally hosted Exchange server provided by Smarsh.
Is there any documentation on how to setup Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2008 and 2010 with an external Exchange server?
I've looked into authenticated SMTP solutions and haven't seen a real definitive way on how to get this to work. I'm currently attempting setting up a virtual SMTP server on the same box and relaying. It doesn't seem to be working (I haven't exhausted all configuration attempts, but it's looking bleak).
EDIT: The problem seems to be that I cannot get TFS to talk to an external SMTP server that requires authentication. Is there a way to do this?
It seems pretty crappy that TFS has no real configuration for email.
EDIT: I should also note that this is with TFS 2010 (clients being Visual Studio 2010)
Best Answer
So I was able to make TFS send emails not through a local exchange.
commandbreak was correct in the fact that TFS does not need Exchange. It needs a SMTP server. The problem we were running into is that we still had Exchange, but our Exchange server was off of our domain. This lead to us not being able to pass authentication to this Exchange server because TFS appears not to support authenticated SMTP.
For Server 2008: (should be relevant for 2003) To fix this
After closing the TFS Administration Console I went into Visual Studio 2010 and configured myself to receive alerts whenever a work item was assigned to me. I then went through a bunch of bugs created by failed builds and assigned them to me. It took a few minutes but I got the emails.
I can only assume that this works because Smarsh has an account for us with the username/email address that I put in for the from address for the TFS email alerts. I had originally tried setting up the virtual SMTP to use basic authentication using the from email address/username and password, but this didn't work.
I'm not sure if this also works because our domain used to have our MX record point here so the SMTP server is not blacklisted. I would like to think that Smarsh is smart enough to figure out that we're relaying from our internal network to their servers which is basically just back to us. This may not work if you relay and your destination email address for a configured alert is on a service that does checking for junk mail (a GMail, Hotmail, etc type of destination).
Hopefully this will help someone else out. I've been working on trying to configure things way too long!