Route emails directly from Exchange to SharePoint

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We're trying to use the Microsoft-supplied Help Desk template for our SharePoint help desk site (running on WSS 3.0) and are having problems trying to create tickets from emails. When working correctly, the site should accept an email and then create a list item (service ticket) from that email. To set this up in SharePoint, we can specify an email address such as helpdesk@sharepoint.ourdomain.com (we can't change the ourdomain.com part).

The problem is: when someone sends an email to this address, our Exchange server realizes that it isn't a valid Exchange account, so it sends it to our Barracuda box. The Barracuda box sends it to SharePoint, but it appends "btv1==2372983023…" to the beginning of the address (which I understand is used to prevent backscatter). SharePoint receives this email and sees that there is no such user (because SharePoint checks the user's email address against Active Directory).

If we could get the email to SharePoint without the "btv1…" part, it would work fine. Can someone tell me how we should route from Exchange to SharePoint directly, so that the Barracuda box doesn't get in the way? After reading a suggested solution online, we tried creating an SMTP connector in Exchange, pointing @sharepoint.ourdomain.com emails to the IP of our SharePoint server. We then assigned this new connector a higher cost value than the "out to the Internet" SMTP connector. That didn't work though. Any ideas?

Thanks.

Best Answer

Create a contact. Set the email address to SMTP:helpdesk@sharepoint.ourdomain.com

I know it sounds weird, but this is just how it works.

Related Solutions

Making Exchange treat email address specified in AD user properies as external

I don't know where SharePoint gets its list of email recipients, but the following should do what you want on the Exchange side:

Remove the "SomeEmail@gmail.com" address from the AD user account if you haven't already.
Create a mail-enbled contact object in the Active Directory and assign it the email address "SomeEmail@gmail.com".
Add the newly-created contact as an alternative delivery recipient on the "Exchange General" tab of the user's properties by clicking "Delivery Options", selecting the "Forward To" radio button, clicking "Modify", and choosing the newly-created contact from the AD. Optionally check the "Deliver messages to both forwarding address and mailbox" if you so choose.

That will get Exchange to deliver mail to that user to an external email address.

Sharepoint Document Library not receiving emails

First off, you need to make sure that you have an MX record somewhere in DNS so that a mail server can deliver to the sharepoint server. This could be a public DNS record, or internal, depending on your needs.

To test whether you have set up Sharepoint and the local SMTP server properly try the following:

View the folder you configured the smtp server to deliver to (C:\Inetpub\mailroot\Drop for example) - you will watch this to see if messages are delivered.

Then open a telnet session to the sharepoint server on port 25. Via this you can "send" a test message directly to the smtp server using the address of your Document Library.

telnet spserver.localdomain.local 25
ehlo test.com
MAIL FROM: <test@test.com>
RCPT TO: <doclib@spserver.localdomain.local>
DATA
Subject: Test Message
This is a test message
.

If you have your smtp server configured correctly, and you see a message saying the message was queued after typing the above, then you should see a file appear in the folder you are watching.

If Sharepoint is configured to check this folder correctly, after a few minutes you should see the message disappear from the folder and appear in the Document Library.

The only time I have seen messages disappear from the drop folder, and not appear in the Doc Library, it has been when sending messages with nothing in the body. Sharepoint seems to discard these, even if there is an attachment.

I also had issues where Sharepoint was creating contacts in AD with the wrong email address - check these are created as you would expect otherwise Exchange may discard mail coming in from outside.

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