The SharePoint Swiss Army Knife

Here’s something new that I just came across as I was trolling STSADM documentation… Did you know that you can set unique outgoing email settings per web application in SharePoint? Well, you probably didn’t because there’s no configuration page for it in Central Administration (there’s a config page that applies the outgoing email settings globally, not per web app).

What are some use cases for this?

• Maybe you have a different web app per business unit and you want to have each web app send emails from different addresses. Examples:
  • SharePoint emails from Accounting department comes from accounting@company.com while emails from Human Resources come from hr@company.com. The same configuration options are available for the reply-to addresses.
• Maybe you have some multi-tenancy going on in your environment and you want each web app to send SharePoint emails through unique SMTP servers.
  • You can configure one tenant’s web app to send mail through one SMTP server while another tenant’s uses another SMTP server.

Magical STSADM command:
stsadm -o email -outsmtpserver mail.example.com -fromaddress someone@example.com -replytoaddress someone@example.com -codepage 65001 -url http://web_app_url