One of the first things a user may ask their shiny, new SharePoint 2016 site collection to do is to have the ability to send email. Luckily, this is pretty easy to do and will just rely on you getting to grips with a few things about SMTP server:

• SMTP server address
• SMTP server port number

If you don’t know either of these, then it might be worth getting friendly with your system admins as they should be able to help! To start configuring outgoing email in SharePoint 2016, we need to set it up at the central admin level:

• Navigate to central admin – system settings

• Under Email and Text Messages – Configure outgoing email settings

• In Outgoing email settings – enter your SMTP server information, from, reply-to address and press OK

Now your SharePoint environment should be configured to send outgoing email, next we will check that outgoing email is set up correctly at the web application level:

• Navigate back to Central Admin – under Application Management – Manage web applications

• Select the web application you wish to manage

• Press the General Settings drop down – Outgoing email

Check that SMTP server details are correct (based on the farm level configuration we did earlier), you can also personalise the from and reply-to addresses for the web application if you want them to be different to the top-level.

BONUS

One issue I’ve encountered when configuring outgoing email in SharePoint 2016 is where lists or libraries aren’t sending email alerts. The initial email is sent when alerts are setup, but the subsequent email alerts don’t fire.

The issue quite a specific one but worth mentioning, as at first I applied this security update which included an update for outgoing email, but didn’t solve the problem. It turned out that in Exchange Server, if anonymous Relay settings isn’t enabled, then your SharePoint servers need to be added to the allowed hosts relay list. So back to my earlier point, if this issue affects you – make sure you take your system admin to lunch to pick his brain about exchange relays!