Sending SharePoint emails through the cloud

It’s true! It’s possible to send your SharePoint emails through the cloud, or even to your internal email server using authentication or a different port. The trick is to use a local IIS SMTP service to relay the email for you. You can configure the SMTP service to relay email to a specific host and authenticate as needed.

First thing is to install the SMTP service on a server. A couple of notes on that

• Installed through Windows Features as SMTP Server.
• Make sure II6 Management tools are installed as well (can’t access SMTP via IIS7 tools).
• Depending on the amount of emails sent, you may want to setup a small virtual server dedicated for this traffic, otherwise use an application server in your farm.
• Redundancy is possible using a load balancer.

Once the SMTP services are installed, go into IIS 6.0 Manager.

• Start the SMTP Virtual Server if it is not already started.
• Right click the [SMTP Virtual Server #] and go to Properties.
• Click the Access tab, then click Authentication button at the top
  
• Check to ensure Anonymous Access. This will allow traffic from SharePoint to this SMTP service.
• Click OK.
• Click Relay button at the bottom.
• Add the IP addresses of the servers that will be sending the email. If you’re installing SMTP on the SharePoint server, make sure to include 127.0.0.1 to allow local traffic.
  
• Click OK.
• Click the Delivery tab.
• Click Outbound Security button at bottom.
• Select Basic Authentication, and enter in your cloud login credentials, this in most cases will be the same credentials you use when logging into web mail.
  
• Click OK.
• Click Outbound Connections.
• If you want to specify the port to send on, change the TCP Port value. For example, GoDaddy uses port 80 for outgoing. If your ISP blocks the normal port 25 traffic, you’ll need to change the port.
  
• Click OK.
• Click Advanced.
• This will force the SMTP service to send all emails out to your email service provider.
  • In the Masquerade domain, specify the outgoing SMTP server from your email service, i.e. smtpout.secureserver.net for GoDaddy.
  • In the Fully-qualified domain name, (FQDN) specify the DNS entry for your mail server. This is NOT the FQDN of your server, but the email service you’re using, basically your MX record needs to match this.
  • In the Smart host, specify the outgoing SMTP server from your email service, i.e. smtpout.secureserver.net for GoDaddy.
    
• Click OK, twice.
• Go into Central Administration > System Settings > Configure Outgoing E-Mail Settings.
• Specify the Outbound SMTP Server, and address you want to use.
• Click OK.

That should do it! A quick and easy test is to hop into SharePoint and subscribe to an alert. Make sure your profile has an email ;).

Happy SharePointing!