AWG Blogs

Friday, July 2, 2010

WSS 3.0 Incoming Email -- Must use FQDN

I wanted to be able to send email from my Outlook to a WSS discussion list. After much testing and troubleshooting with various configurations (and a lot of googling) I came to realize that (barring any workarounds that I'm not aware of) the CA - Operations - Incoming E-Mail Settings - E-mail server display address MUST match the machine FQDN! It cannot be the machine's DNS name. I tried adding the DNS name of the machine here, and email would just get bounced back (or get stuck in the Queue since I didn't have the smart host configured and this is not an Exchange server).

So as a result, I can send email using discussions@mymachine.fq.dn -- but NOT discussions@mymachine.dns.name.

I'm sure there are workarounds, but they might involve fiddling with Exchange servers and/or DNS servers that are outside of my control.

Now that I think about it, it makes sense that the WSS doesn't understand the DNS implications; why should it? On the other hand, why can't WSS figure out that mymachine.dns.name is the local server? Hmmmmm. Perhaps it's an IIS 6 SMTP limitation...