E-mail discussion lists in SharePoint. Like many organizations, our primary means of communication and collaboration is via e-mail. While far from perfect, it allows for easy communication between groups and individuals, both inside and outside the organization. We also have a few e-mail discussion lists that we use as well to facilitate communications between specific groups of people.

Over the past week or so I've been working on trying to get SharePoint to act as a e-mail discussion list. I created a discussion list in SharePoint, and enabled incoming mail so that users could use send mail directly to the discussion list and have it show up there. SharePoint would then distribute that message to all members of that collaboration site using the Alerts mechanism. Here is where things break down.

The problem is that users cannot automatically reply to the Alert and have it sent to the discussion list. Being able to do this would close the loop, and allow users to continue to communicate using email, but have their messages archived onSharePoint. This is fairly standard listserv behaviour, but out-of-the-box, this functionality is not supported by SharePoint. (Aside: This has been a common discovery for me. More then one quest for basic functionality has led to the same conclusion: SharePoint does not support this functionality out of the box. You can develop it yourself or buy a third-party product.)

I was sure that there would be some way to customize the reply-to address of the alerts. I was even hoping that, by default, if a list had an incoming email address set up for it, that the alerts generated for that list would automatically have that as their reply-to address. Alas, no.

By defaults, the from and reply to for alerts are specified at the topmost level in SharePoint Central Administration > Operations > Outgoing E-Mail Settings. That means there is one email address for all the web applications, sites, etc that you create on that SharePoint instance. There is no configuration option that allows me to specify something more specific. The customization mechanism for alerts (which involve a knowledge of CAML, HTML, and CSS, and are carried out by modifying the file alerttemplates.xml) is limited to the content and formatting of the alert, and does not involve the message metadata like from and reply-to. I'm sure you can write code to do this, and I'm hoping there might be a product out there that we can purchase to add this basic functionality to SharePoint.

In fact, I found only one reference online to this kind of functionality. A quick e-mail exchange with the developers of that site confirmed that they accomplished this through the writing of custom code. Now, I'm not against writing code per-se, but isn't this why I'm paying the licensing fee for the software? If I'm going to have to write code to get basic functionality, then I might as well go with an OSS package and take it from there.

I consider this, by the way, to be a major failure for SharePoint. The ability to provide basic listserv functionality is fundamental for any collaborative technology. For the price we are paying for SharePoint, I would expect this functionality to be built-in. I'm not ready to give up on SharePoint, but this is a difficult pill to have to swallow.