SharePoint/Exchange Distribution List Mirroring?

Question

A client of mine is at a conference, and someone there spoke to him about something he called "Distribution list mirroring" - something to the effect of automatically copying emails up to a SharePoint discussion thread. That way, people can subscribe to a discussion list or visit it on their own without having to be in a mail group and receive all of the emails. They could even set up feeds or alerts if they want. He wasn't clear on where such a feature would be turned on/configured … from Outlook or SP or Exchange.

Does anyone know what he could be talking about?

Answer 1

I think what you want is an email-enabled document library. You would

1. Setup the doc library with an email address
2. Add the email address to the distribution group
3. Watch email roll into the document library. From here you alert, rss, search....

I don't think this capability is available to discussion lists though.

Answer 2

In WSS v3.0 discussion lists have an email handler that preserves the threading of the conversation etc.

Answer 3

Further to previous questions, you can also create mail enabled security groups in WSS3.

Answer 4

If the SharePoint admin has configured incoming email correctly on the servers and in Central Admin, there should be an "Incoming Email Settings" option in the settings for a SharePoint Discussion List. You just assign an incoming email address, and then you can cc that address on any email discussions threads. As mentioned earlier, the discussion list will attempt to maintain the thread for incoming emails with matching subject lines (at least that's what it appears to do, I've never Reflectored the code for it or anything).

Like any other kind of list discussion lists allow you to subscribe to alerts (via email or RSS feed) for new items as well.

One thing to note about incoming email into lists/libraries, is that SharePoint basically trusts the "from" address and attributes items to those users just as if they had actually authenticated and put things in via the web interface, which is a little bit sketchy from an audit trail standpoint if you are concerned about that kind of thing.