How to set up email for document libraries without affecting existing email addresses

Question

My goal is simple - have SharePoint document libraries to be able to receive emails, and I try to get this done as minimal as possible without affecting other features or services.

In Central Administration, I enabled "Sites on this server to receive Email". And picked "no" for Directory Management Services. Where I got stuck is the "E-mail server display address" field.

What should I put for this field? To be honest I'm not really sure about the mechanism behind the entire email receiving feature. I mean, are we supposed to use our organization's email domain for this? Or this could be spoofed to whatever we pick? Let's say our organization have the email domain of @my.org, do I have to use that? Or can I use @foobar.com? or a sub-domain of our organization domain such as @email.my.org?

Assume we could only use the domain for our organization. When I create the email address for the document library, what should I put for that email address? Would SharePoint actually create a valid email to Active Directory? If we could put anything for the email of document library, let's say [email protected], what if there is already a employee using that as a valid email? Wouldn't that cause a conflict? Would they (the person and the SharePoint doc library) both receive the email?

As you can tell I'm not sure how the back end interacts with each other...

Answer 1

My organisation has the domain myorg.com and my email address is [email protected]. Our SharePoint farm uses the sub-domain sp.myorg.com and any email enabled lists will use [email protected]. Of course there is still the issue of duplicates if different sites have lists with the same name. A naming convention, for example incorporating the site name in the list email address [email protected], might help reduce that risk.