Today I have been fighting with enabling SharePoint to receive email. Due to a misconfiguration of our farm it took me quite some longer than it should have done. Anyhow, here are the steps.

First of all I created an OU in our Active Directory. This OU will hold all the email addresses (contacts) from all the list I enable in SharePoint. I only have to create the OU and delegate control to the account that is running the Application Pool of SharePoint Central Administration.

1. Create the OU (I named it SharePointEmail).
2. Right Click the just created OU and choose [Delegate Control], you will be presented with the Delegation of Control Wizard (I have Server 2008). Just walk  through the wizard and add the account that is running the Application Pool of SharePoint Central Administration.
   When you come to the point that the wizard is asking which tasks to delegate, choose “Create a custom task to delegate”. The next screen is “Active Directory object type”, just leave the default of “This folder, existing objects in this folder, and creation of new objects in this folder”. On the “Permissions” screen choose Read, Write and Create all Child Objects. Press next and finish and you’re done.
3. Create a new MX record in DNS. I created one called SharePoint, so eventually my mailing lists will have an email address like <list>.sharepoint.mydomain.local. This record will tell your mail server to forward mail to the designated server (which is your sharepoint server).
    
4. Log into your SharePoint server and install the SMTP feature.
5. Now Configure the SMTP Server to accept messages coming from your exchange server. Therefore open IIS 6.0 Manager (even on a w2008 server), and right click on your SMTP Virtual Server. Click the [Access] tab, and then click the [Relay] button. Add the IP address from your exchange server here. Then Press OK twice, till your back in IIS manager.
    
6. You have to add an alias to your SMTP Server.
   In the IIS manager select “Domains” below your SMTP Virtual Server and right click anywhere in the right section. Select [New] and then [Domain]. In the domain type select Alias, click next and fill in the name of your MX record you created earlier (mine was sharepoint.mydomain.local.
7. Next steps are in Sharepoint Central Administrator, so fire it up.
8. Select the [Operations] tab, and under the section “”Topology and Services”, click on [Incoming Email Settings].
    
9. Select the following options:
   -  Enable sites on this server to receive email: Yes
   - Settings Mode: Automatic
   - Use the Sharepoint Directory Manager….(blah blah)…: Yes
   - Active Directory Container: OU=SharepointEmail,DC=mydomain,DC=Local
   this is the direction to the OU you created in step 1, SharePoint will automatically create the contacts in this OU (and you give it the right to do it, in step 2… see I love it when a plan comes together).
   -  SMTP mail server for incoming mail: <FQDN of your sharepoint server>
   - Accept messages from authenticated users only: Yes
   - Allow creation of distribution groups from SharePoint sites: Yes
   - Distribution group request approval settings: Select “Create new distribution group” and  “Delete distribution group”
   - E-mail server display address: sharepoint.mydomain.local
   - Accept mail from these safe…… : <the IP address of your exchange server>
   yes.. the IP address and not the FQDN
   Click [OK]

So that’s basically it. Now you can enable your lists for incoming mail and give it an email address.