Brainlitter » Incoming Emails to SharePoint 2013 lists or libraries suddenly stop working

Incoming Emails to SharePoint 2013 lists or libraries suddenly stop working

I ran into a strange one today, that I don’t believe was replicable in SharePoint 2010.  Note, this article isn’t about the steps or actions necessary to get that going, there are plenty of posts out on the Interweb that cover that.

What

I had SharePoint 2013 working perfectly fine for incoming emails to SharePoint lists and libraries in our new SharePoint 2013 farm.  Was hunky dory for some time.  All of a sudden (well, I didn’t notice it right away, we don’t have that many inbound messages to lists or libraries so it took a few days to notice), emails were getting stuck in the SMTP Drop folder (in my case, the default location is still C:inetpubmailrootDrop).  Messages were starting to stack up in there and no matter what I tried (Timer Service Restart, forced Incoming Email Timer Service run, IISRESET, Reboot), nothing would set those messages free.

So What

Someone in our office (I’m not naming names, Colin’s identity will be kept confidential Winking smile) started the “Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Incoming E-Mail” service on the other server in our farm.  I had already turned it on, on our App Server weeks ago and had incoming email functioning properly.  However, when Mr. P (confidentiality is important) implemented Nintex, I gather during the lazy approval portion of setup, he started the service on our Front End Server as well.

The problem it turns out, is documented nicely here: http://get-spchopps.com/post/2012/11/20/Incoming-E-Mail-on-SharePoint-2013.aspx

So I don’t need to go into great detail on the fix other than to restate that:

  1. You should have only one server in the farm configured for SMTP incoming email
  2. In Central Admin (/_admin/Server.aspx) you should ensure the Incoming E-Mail service is stopped for all servers except the intended server

Now What

Here’s the final heads up and Jimmy spells it out in his blog but it also needs to be restated here or you might find yourself waiting a long time (up to a day in fact).

After you have the appropriate servers configured for Incoming email (just one of them) and you are in the same situation as I was where it worked once and stopped working, you will want to:

  1. Run the Timer Job “Timer Service Recycle”. This job only runs daily and until I kicked it in the pants, nothing was taking shape.  It ran for a good 10 minutes but when it finished, emails whooshed out of the drop folder and I was back in business

Moral of the Story

Don’t start services in SharePoint on servers in the farm willy nilly, particularly if it is the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Incoming E-Mail service.

Stay safe out there!
Sean

4 responses to “Incoming Emails to SharePoint 2013 lists or libraries suddenly stop working”

  1. You can set up incoming e-mail so that SharePoint sites can store e-mail conversations as they happen,save e-mailed records, and show e-mailed events on site calenders. Moreover, you can set up the SharePoint Directory Management Service to provide assistance for e-mail submission list development and management.

  2. Hey man,

    Turns out that the darned incoming email service is ALWAYS enabled by default on SharePoint servers. Has been since 2010. It annoyed me because it would be on when I didn’t have a drop folder enabled locally (or a remote folder specified), and it was yet another thing that breaks continuity when teaching people about services that should be started on the server (namely, only things you can account).

    So your buddy may not have absent mindedly turned it on- it was already on by default. It shouldn’t do anything though until you *configure* it, which your buddy might be guilty of doing.

  3. I am in 2010 and in the last few weeks had a few strange issues with Incoming Emails. Something is setting the deleted flag for a particular email enabled list to true in the config database. On the UI the list is totally fine and was never deleted. Have you encountered anything like it?

    Thanks,
    Sabin

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