Configuring incoming and outgoing e-mail

I was testing out a few things in a lab with Exchange 2010 and SharePoint 2010, and I naturally wanted to configure incoming and outgoing mail.

The safe place to look is of couse there: E-mail Integration for SharePoint Foundation 2010.

But being really Exchange-stupid, I needed some help and I found theses two guides below, which especially had nice screenshots of the Exchange 2010 pieces of the puzzle:

 

Now, of course I had some problems anyway -- some because I was trying to do it too fast and missing some steps, but also a few weird things, I want to share:

* Most importantly, the timer service did not pick up the incoming eml messages in the SMTP drop folder - they were just sitting there. I had Incoming Email configured to "Automatic", which means it should pick up the drop folder location from the SMTP service. But for some reason, it couldn't contact the service. So, I ended up changing it to "Advanced" and entering the folder location of the drop folder, and then it worked.

* Also, I enabed the directory services in order to get the email contact created automatically. It created the contact fine, but it only added an external address for the contact - which meant it wasn't directly available in outlook contacts. So, when I added an internal SMTP address (same email address of course) then it worked. Again being at exchange 100-level, I didn't have a clue - but it worked and I got my things tested - which was want I wanted in the lab....