Using Email enabled document libraries in Sharepoint 2007

Question

What do you think of using email-enabled document libraries in SP2007? Is it reliable? secure? or too complicated to get it to work correctly?

Also would it accept emails from "anyone" sending to that address? What about other fields the document library may have (like for example adding a single line of text field to hold a classification field for example).

Answer 1

It is great for storing emails, building automated knowledge bases or easing publishing of articles to your intranet.

I encountered problems when a large amount of emails are being sent at the same time (e.g. when error alerts are being emailed). We wanted to trigger approval workflow for each item but if more then 10 emails arrived workflow did not fire on each item.

As Laney pointed out it also missed some "intelligence" to route email or to join same conversations together. Microsoft CRM has much better engine for handling incoming emails.

Conclusion: It is a nice feature if you are aware of its limitations.

Answer 2

I think it can be a very good use for storing the occasional email along with other related info and have seen it work well for that use. I don't typically suggest it for storing large amounts of email. Other products like CRM or an exchange archiver etc have better management of large amounts of email communications. There is a option on whether to accept email from any user or just those with permission to the library. From memory i don't think it can set additional metadata,