Is it possible to setup an email for a site colleciton versus a web application?

Question

I manage a SP 2010 site for my corporation. I have a workflow setup on a document library which sends out emails to users upon workflow activation. I want to change the email address from which the workflow sends out emails (the "from" field in emails that users receive from the site). The SharePoint Server technical team has stated though that the email address is setup for the entire "WEB application and can't be changed for a site collection." I'm not sure what he means by that but can somebody tell me if its possible to setup email for a site collection and not at a web application level (which apparently would affect all site collections)?

In case it helps, the site URL follows the format: https://sharepoint.ourcompany.com/sites/MySpecificSite/

There are other sites (not managed by me under the "sites" path) which is what I assume the Sharepoint administrator is referring to as being affected if he changes the email for the web application.

Note, the website is not build via custom code so I'm looking for some way to do this (or someway for the SharePoint/Exchange Server technicians) to do this without having to write code, with the exception maybe of a web part I can insert, if that's an option.

Answer 1

Your admins are correct as outbound email addresses can only be defined in two places in SharePoint - 1) at the farm level which affects all email sent from anywhere in SharePoint and 2) at the Web Application level which refers to the entry point for the site, most commonly that is the base URL, such as http://myserver.domain.com/ where all site collections would usually be defined under the /sites/ path on that URL. All site collections in a web application share the same outbound email setting.

You could move your site collection to its own Web Application and configure your email settings that way. However, I'm betting that your admins would frown upon that as each new Web Application consumes a fair amount of server resources. It would be hard to justify this unless this is either a very high profile site or one with unusually confidential data.

If you need more than that then you will have to write code and implement your own email handler using the MailMessage class in .Net.