SharePoint 2013 Incoming Email Stuck in Drop Folder

Background

- I have a SharePoint 2013 farm with 7 servers (excluding DB)

5 App Severs and 2 Web Servers

- Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Incoming E-Mail service was already enabled on all the servers in the farm.

- From Exchange side, I had configured the 2 WFE to receive mails (let us call them WFE1 and WFE2 for now).I also installed SMTP server on both the WFE1 and WFE2.

Post on Configuring Incoming Email

Now the problem…

Mails were getting dropped on the Drop folder. But…but…..the Sharepoint list was not receiving the emails. This left me banging head against wall for few hours.

I had done this before on my SharePoint 2013 sandbox (single server farm )

I read and tried multiple of things to fix this. Finally what helped me is below.

1) I stopped the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Incoming E-Mail service on all the servers.

 I read this article.

Key excerpts from the article

 “In SharePoint 2010, the Incoming Email service timer job had a SPJobLockType of None, which means that the job ran on all servers in the farm, given the Incoming Email service was provisioned.

In SharePoint 2013, that SPJobLockType has changed to Job, which means it only runs on a single member in the farm”

SharePoint 2010:

public SPIncomingEmailJobDefinition(string name, SPService service) : base(name, service, null, SPJobLockType.None){}

SharePoint 2013:

public SPIncomingEmailJobDefinition(string name, SPService service) : base(name, service, null, SPJobLockType.Job){}

2) Based on the above info, I started the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Incoming E-Mail service on just one of the WFE.The mails were stuck in the drop folder,still.

3) I restarted the SharePoint Timer Service (SPTimerV4) on all the (7) server in the farm.

Voila…

All the mails that were stuck in the Drop folder started delivering now.

Resolution

The fix is enable the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Incoming E-Mail service on only one server in the farm and restart SharePoint Timer Service on all servers in the farm