Applies To: SharePoint

I’m going to show you how to temporarily reroute SharePoint’s outgoing email to your desktop where you can either ignore it or forward it as necessary. There are a variety of legitimate reasons to do this. Generally I’ve used this when working in a small development or testing environment where email isn’t setup and it would be a huge hassle. However, I’ve also done this to test changes that involve email blasts (like false alarms on mysite deletions or screwy workflow debugging). As with anything, use some common sense about how and when to use this.

To run a dummy SMTP server on your desktop you’ll want to use smtp4dev by RNWood. This is a great little program that sits in the system tray and intercepts messages sent to it. You can then view, save or even forward them (from your account) and more. I’ve used it for years for all sorts of projects and I highly recommend it.

Configuring Outgoing Email

Generally your outgoing email settings in SharePoint were configured as part of your initial farm setup. To adjust these settings you’ll need to head to Central Administration. In SharePoint 2010 you’ll want to click on System Settings then choose Configure outgoing e-mail settings under E-Mail and Text Messages (SMS):

There’s only one thing we need to adjust here and that’s the Outbound SMTP server. If this is just a temporary change, be sure to write down the current value somewhere so you can set it back. Just put the name of your desktop here (Depending on your environment you may need to use your IP Address or whatever DNS entry points to where you are running smtp4dev). If you haven’t already configured your From address and Reply-to address go ahead and do that. you can just make them up (they don’t have to correspond to an actual mailbox, they just need to be email addresses). Your settings should look something like this:

Once you hit okay you will start receiving emails in smtp4dev (So be sure it’s running). You can also make these changes using Stsadm and can apply them to individual web applications instead of the whole farm like shown above. See this article for more details: Configure outgoing e-mail.

Sending a Test Email from SharePoint

So how do you know it’s working? Unless this is a large production farm with lots of alerts and other things flying off all the time you may not see anything at all. You can of course setup alerts on some list and then trigger events that would send the alert, but that can be a big hassle. Fortunately, you can have SharePoint send you an email through PowerShell.

Just copy and paste the script below and save as TestEmail.ps1:

$sd = New-Object System.Collections.Specialized.StringDictionary
$sd.Add("to","you@somedomain.com")
$sd.Add("from","spadmin@somedomain.com")
$sd.Add("subject","Test Email")
$w = Get-SPWeb http://somedomain.com
$body = "This is a test email sent from SharePoint, Wowee!!"

try {
	[Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPUtility]::SendEmail($w,$sd,$body)
}
finally {
	$w.Dispose()
}

This is a pretty straightforward script. It builds a StringDictionary with some obvious entries and then calls the SendEmail function of the SPUtility class to have SharePoint send the email. Just replace the dictionary entries with appropriate values and be sure to switch the web address (line 5) to one of yours. To run it, open the SharePoint Management Shell (You’ll want to run-as a farm administrator) and navigate to the location of the script. You can run it by typing: .\TestEmail.ps1

If you switch back over to where you are running smtp4dev you should see a new entry:

You can double click the message to open it in your mail program:

You can also click Inspect to see all the details:

That’s it! Just be sure to switch the settings back if this was a temporary test. Of course, as long as you use your real email address in the to entry above then you can run the TestEmail.ps1 script again to ensure things are sending properly after you switch things back.