You've probably noticed how prevalent listservs and e-mail newsletters have become. In some industries they have actually become one of the most relied-upon tools for up-to-the-minute industry information. Even DevX sends them out to subscribers—nineteen newsletters at last count. The good news is that people are subscribing to them. The bad news is that too many people are subscribing to them. You've probably discovered that multiple people in your organization are subscribing to the same newsletter, while others may not even be aware that this resource exists to help them. Happily, using Exchange Server and public folders, you can help resolve both of those problems with one move.
This 10-Minute Solution discusses how to subscribe an Exchange public folder to e-mail newsletters so that only one copy of it comes in and is immediately available to everybody who might be interested, without cluttering their individual mailboxes.
First, create a public folder. In some cases you may want to create a public folder for each newsletter, but if there are multiple newsletters that cover roughly the same subject, you can subscribe them all to the same folder. Give the folder a logical name and give folder permissions to everybody you think might have an interest in the newsletter.
If you want this to be a "read-only" newsletter folder where people can read and review, but not post or delete, just give everybody Reviewer status. On the other hand, if you want people to be able to post their own comments about the newsletters and discuss them interactively, give them Author status.
Unless there is a compelling reason not to do so, give everybody in your company access to that folder. It's simpler to administer and chances are there's little in the folder that is sensitive and shouldn't be seen by everybody who wants to read it.
That done, you need to make one more permissions change. Give the "Anonymous" account at least permission to create items in the folder; otherwise it won't accept the e-mailed newsletters.
Tip: You can also use an existing public folder if you have one that seems like a logical destination for these newsletters. If it's well-trafficked, balance the extra clutter of the newsletters against the advantage of fewer folders for your users to monitor.
Once you've created the public folder, take note of the e-mail address assigned to it. You can find this information in a couple of places, but the easiest is probably to open the Exchange Administrator program, look under your Organization collection, the Folders collection, and the Public Folders object. Find the public folder in question and look at its properties for the e-mail addresses tab. The SMTP address is what you're interested in and it probably looks like "newfolder@domain.com," where newfolder is the name you gave that folder.
Once you know that information, you can go through the process of subscribing that folder to the newsletters. Simply follow the ordinary subscription instructions for the newsletter, but give the newfolder@domain.com address as the delivery point.
Now you're all set to share those e-mailed newsletters with your entire department or company.
