Note: MS Exchange or your mail distribution system (Majordomo in our case) must be configured to route all emails that suffix with @sharepoint.hq.MyDomainName.com to C:\Inetpub\mailroot\Drop folder of SMTP Virtual Server installed on MOSSServer1.

10. Safe E-Mail Servers: Accept mail from all e-mail servers is selected.

That's it, incoming e-mail feature for MOSS 2007 is configured...Congratulations!

Now, Let's talk about testing this feature...(Please keep in mind that we have Unix based Majordomo mail distribution system in our organization) Most of the time it worked fine for receiving e-mails in SharePoint however we stopped receiving e-mails after 2-3 days of testing. We were unable to telnet into server on port 25. SharePoint server(with Virutal SMTP Server installed) was not listening on port 25. We checked “Connection” property under “Access” tab of SMTP Virtual Server properties and noticed that SMTP server is accepting connection only from 196.X.X.123 server however we configured to receive e-mails from any e-mail server. So We removed that IP Address (196.X.X.123) from the “Computers” tab and set connection settings to “All except the list below” by keeping “Computers” tab empty. After this change, we started receiving e-mails in SharePoint as normal but question was how this change was occurred and who made changes to “Connection” settings? and here is the answer :-)

While testing incoming e-mail feature in SharePoint, we set “Accept mails from these safe e-mail servers” with the above IP Address (196.X.X.123) and that changed “Connection” settings of SMTP Virtual Server in IIS. This was the root cause of this issue. So be very careful when you make any configuration changes to your incoming e-mail settings.

As I mentioned before I am pretty excited about announcing this feature in our SharePoint production enviornment however here are the few things what I am concerned about,

How can we manage undelivered emails?

1. What happens to emails, which are sent to wrong email addresses? SharePoint logs refer that as Unknown Alias. How does SMTP server handles it? Is there anyway we(or SharePoint Admin email account) can get notified for undelivered email messages? We tried to set email account in SMTP server properties for Undelivered emails but that didn't help. We would like sender to receive bounce back email when email is sent to wrong email address or at least SharePoint administrator account get notified when email is not delivered to SharePoint.

2. We have Distribution List set for different groups. Let's say for example, dl-spadmins has all email accounts of SharePoint administrators. If we add email address for SharePoint document library in this DL and then send email to dl-spadmins, all members of that DL receive email but SharePoint document library does NOT receive this email. Is there anyway to troubleshoot this issue?

Why we want to add email address for SharePoint document library to Distribution List (DL)? Because we can not find those contacts in SharePoint even though we have configured Directory Management Service for incoming email feature in SharePoint and that is because we have Majordomo mail distribution system instead of MS Exchange (I believe this is the reason, we can not find those contacts in MS Outlook but I am not sure) So if we add contacts for important SharePoint document libraries to DL of relevant department (Site Collection), anybody can send email to DL, which will send email/document to all the members of DL as well as SharePoint document library and nobody needs to remember email address of SharePoint document library. All they need to do is, just send an email to DL and it will reach both the members of DL and SharePoint document library, which these members are going to access later.

When you add email address of email enabled Document Library to Distribution List(DL), permissions for email must be set to "Accept e-mail messages from any sender" in order to receive email in SharePoint and yes, It shows "System Account" for those messages or the documents received in Document Library. This is already been discussed in this Blog and unfortunately we are still struggling for an appropriate solution. If you set "Save all attachments in folders grouped by e-mail sender" , it creates a new folder for each new sender and then add attachments to that folder however it still shows "System Account" under "Modified By" field but at least it gives you an idea (by looking at the folder name) who sent that email/documents to your Document Library.

If you set "Accept e-mail messages based on document library permissions" then the email will not be received in SharePoint.

One more thing...

If you set "Accept e-mail messages based on document library permissions" option for your Document Library and if somebody, who doesn't have permissions on your Document Library sends an email to your Document Library, it never arrives in your Document Library. Also Sender will not receive any bounce back. So Sender assumes that he has successfully sent an email to your Document Library and you never receive it. Now, this issue might be specific to Majordomo(Unix based) email distribution system and may work well with MS Exchange configuration. I have tested this in my Lab with MS Exchange and I believe it sends the bounce back message if you don't have permissions on the Document Library but I am not 100% sure. :-(

Finally here is the matrix for reusing same contact name for same library or different library in SharePoint,



References:
http://www.combined-knowledge.com/Downloads%202007.htm
http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=31

Back in September 2007, we upgraded SharePoint Portal Server 2003(SPS 2003) to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007). For some unknown reasons, after finalizing upgrade to MOSS 2007, We have MOSS 2007 environment depending on configuration database of SPS 2003. We are unable to create a new site collection/site if we detach old SPS 2003 configuration database.

One of the best possible way to fix this issue is to reconfigure existing SharePoint 2007 environment and get rid of both old SPS 2003 configuration database and old MOSS 2007 configuration database, which was created as a part of migration to MOSS 2007. We can also think of creating a new web application (Portal Site) and move content databases from original web application to a new web application however we did not want to take any risk of inviting new issues without thoroughly testing it in our MOSS 2007 stage environment, which is almost identical to our MOSS 2007 production environment. I will talk about these two approaches for fixing old (SPS 2003) configuration database dependency issue some other day but my intension of mentioning this issue is to talk about how to make Office 2003 web parts and components to work if in case you upgrade or reconfigure your MOSS 2007 environment.

As I mentioned before, the best possible way to resolve SPS 2003 configuration database depedency issue in MOSS 2007 is to reconfigure MOSS 2007 and that is what we tried first in our MOSS 2007 stage environment. SharePoint stage environment was upgraded to MOSS 2007 the same way as production environment and stage environment also has SPS 2003 configuration database dependency issue. So we reconfigured SharePoint stage environment successfully (I will talk about it in detail some other day) and we noticed that we were unable to install Office 2003 web parts and components after this. We are still using MS Office 2003 company wide. So the only option, we were left with was to reinstall Office 2003 web parts without installing WSS 2.0/SPS 2003. We tried to install Office 2003 web parts and we received following error:

"You must install Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 before you install Office 2003 Web Parts and Components."

We found following KB Articles, which explain more about this error message and its work around.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929320
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927602
Here is the link for downloading Office 2003 Add-in for MOSS 2007,

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=38be67a5-2056-46a1-84b1-337ffb549c5c&displaylang=en

So if you upgrade SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007 or if you reconfigure existing MOSS 2007 environment and if you want to reinstall Office 2003 web parts (to use it with MS Office 2003, I know nobody would personally prefer it over MS Office 2007 but if your company is still using MS Office 2003 with MOSS 2007), you can download and install Office 2003 Add-in from above link, which will allow you to use Office 2003 web parts in MOSS 2007.

Thanks to Microsoft for releasing this Add-in on time otherwise we would require to start from the scratch, meaning refresh OS on the servers, install SPS 2003 and then upgrade it back to MOSS 2007 just to have Office 2003 web parts working in MOSS 2007.