How to Configure Incoming and Outgoing Emails for a SharePoint 2016 Farm

With the recent releases of the SharePoint 2016 technical previews, we keep on exploring different features and identifying new ways to leverage SharePoint 2016 to work smarter, improve the user experience and become more productive.

The purpose of this blog post is to demonstrate how to configure incoming and outgoing emails for a SharePoint 2016 farm.

In order to follow along, you’d need to have the SharePoint 2016 Technical Preview installed. Get the step-by-step instructions on how to install SharePoint 2016 Technical Preview here.

Configure Incoming Emails for SharePoint 2016 Technical Preview

Step 1

Go to Server Manager and click on “Add role or features”.

Step 2

Hit Next.

Step 3

Select Role-based or feature-based installation and hit Next.

Step 4

Select a server from the server pool and hit Next.

Step 5

Under Server Roles, leave the default selections as is and hit Next.

Step 6

Select SMTP Server and then click Next. On the next screen, click Install.

Step 7

Wait until the installation is done.

Step 8

Go to Central Admin > System Applications.

Step 9

In System Settings, hit Configure incoming e-mail settings.

Step 10

Under Enable Incoming E-mail, tick off Yes, enter your domain name (in my case it is “SP16.SP16.pro”). You can choose Safe Email Servers if you’d like. Hit Ok when done.

Step 11

Go to any of the site collections and create a list, or go to the existing list settings. You should be able to see an Incoming email setting option under Communications. Click on the Incoming email setting link.

Step 12

Set Allow this document library to receive Email to Yes. Specify the email address. As shown, there are several advanced configurations on this screen that you can set. I’m focusing on the bare minimum settings for the purpose of keeping this blog simple.

Step 13

To test the configurations, you’d need to send an email to the email address you specified in step 12. Since I am using SharePoint 2016 Technical Preview, installed in my development environment, I am using PowerShell to send my test emails. The method of sending emails may be different in your case.

Step 14

As shown in the script above, I have sent two emails. One with attachments and one without. The highlighted items below were created by the PowerShell script.

Step 15

If you can view your incoming email(s), you have configured incoming emails successfully for SharePoint 2016 Technical Preview.

Configure Outgoing Emails for SharePoint 2016 Technical Preview

Got to Central Admin > System Applications and inside System Settings hit Configure outgoing e-mail settings.

• Provide the following settings for your SMTP Server:
• Outbound SMTP server
• From Address
• Reply to address
• User SSL
• SMTP port

Hit OK.

To test the outbound email settings, create a workflow and send an email. If you receive the email you have successfully configured your outgoing email settings in SharePoint 2016 Technical Preview.

Happy SharePointing 🙂

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