Exchange (2013) Site Mail in sharepoint (2013)

Normally, no mail ever gets sent to SharePoint. SharePoint only sends mail out, and then the correct users on the network get this mail via exchange. So there really isn't any "site mail" persay. There's no mail inside of SharePoint waiting for a SharePoint user to open it. The only reason why someone would want to actually email to SharePoint itself, rather than a user's email address, is to use email to add something on a SharePoint list, but users can just as easily do that themselves. So often, the incoming email settings for a SharePoint site never gets configured in SharePoint Central Admin. But, if for some reason you need people to send emails to "SharePoint", you have to configure incoming mail in Central Admin. As far as how SharePoint knows where to send the mail? It uses the active directory account info for the user.

I think I misunderstood what you meant by site mail. SharePoint uses active directory to determine email addresses. SharePoint is going to use the active directory accounts of one domain. SharePoint can't use the Active directory of another domain. Maybe there are some specialty apps that can accomplish this, but normally every SharePoint site is associated with one Active Directory, the one for the domain it's in. You may be able to enter the accounts of site B active directory into site A active directory, but set their email to reflect the siteB address, and then make sure you give them the lowest level permissions possible in the site A AD.

By site mail I mean a mail user configured in exchange to access an exchange mailbox. I understood that sharepoint accesses exchange to read this mailbox on behalf of this sitemail user. In my configuration it is called SharepointEnterpriseApllicationAccount. (on exchange).

I discovered that I have to give a lot of privileges to a sharepoint user to access this exchange mailbox :( And I don't know what is the right tick in the right place in sharepoint user profiles to allow mail without too much else.

Thanks...

Cheers Bob, You seem to know about the architecture!

You took time in explaining. I have to filter a alot of hype that is put around the new features. like for example this:

"This article describes how to configure Site Mailboxes in SharePoint Server 2013 and Exchange Server 2013. The Site Mailboxes feature provides SharePoint Server 2013 users with team email on a SharePoint site. Site Mailboxes also provides links to SharePoint document libraries in Outlook 2013, enabling users to share files and email messages with other members of a team that are working on a joint project."

So I have easily misunderstood the details of this architechture. I've taken care to setup AD in addition to features that I believe that are neede. I understand only a thiny bit of this all.

In the end it's simple. Like you told me twice what needs to be done. Thanks!

Hey, thanks for the points, but I should add more as you have presented new info as to what you were thinking about. What you posted is a new feature in 2013, and I have 2010, so that changes what I say a little. It looks like this new feature will essentially let you view doc libraries and emails associated with them, in Outlook. So it's really just a way to organize docs with emails about them, and while a minor convenience, it really doesn't do much more than you can do on SharePoint itself. It looks like you are trying to use this common SharePoint email dropbox so that the users on the other domain can access them. So now I see why you were going down this path. But, that article didn't indicate either way whether this will work between two different Domains. Here's a more extensive article about that feature in case you do see an application for it, but I didn't see any mention of an inter domain application for this, and if there isn't, this will do nothing to solve your inter domain problem and the same basic theoretical problems that I mentioned remain (only one AD for SharePoint or even the domain itself).

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/08/22/site-mailboxes-in-the-new-office.aspx

You can explore setting up a trust between the two domains. That will work. Look that up. But it might be an overkill if all you want is for SharePoint (through the IIS SMTP server) to send mail out to external addresses. If you have a small amount of users on domain B that need to receive these emails, then manually adding them to domain A and setting up a contact with a second domain name email address to do the email relaying or forwarding would be the simplest thing to do. But again, make sure that these users have the lowest required priviledges and obviously don't give them VPN or RDP access unless you want to. I always opt for the simple thing if possible, because if you start creating actual trusts between domains, it's one more level of complexity and management and one more thing that can break. But i don't know how many users we are talking about.

BTW, you never said how people from domain B were logging into SharePoint of domain A. If they could log in, and windows authentication was being used, then they should receive email as well because if they can get on to SharePoint via windows auth, then they already have an AD account on domain A.