MrDave's (David Yack) CRM Blog!

One of the new features of Titan/CRM 4 is the ability to have e-mail sent/received directly via Outlook rather than requiring the centralized e-mail router and a outbound SMTP host.  There's a great post on the CRM Team blog that describes the new Outlook feature here.

When this feature is enabled e-mail activities created by the user or on behalf of the user (e.g via Plug-in or Workflow) will be sit in a "pending send" status until the CRM Outlook client connects and deals with sending them out.  This is a great feature and I think it will work much better than having the router for a number of different deployment scenarios.

So what's the issue with your dev or test systems?  Imagine this scenario, you have a copy of production data your doing testing of some enhancements.  Your solution uses workflow or plug-ins etc to generate e-mails or perhaps your testers create them as part of there testing.  This is especially true if sending e-mails or automated e-mails is a key part of your solution.  Prior to CRM 4 you could simply make sure you didn't have a viable way for the e-mail to go out e.g point to an bad mail server.  CRM 4 allows you to configure the install with out specification of an e-mail server.  This leads you to think that no e-mails can go out if I don't have an e-mail server configured right?  Wrong...

Here's how this can happen, you start testing ,generate a bunch of pending e-mail activities.  Then, some one says "hey let's test inside Outlook and make sure things work there too!" so they or the unsuspecting network admin installs the Outlook client.  Assuming that Outlook client is connected to a valid e-mail account, as soon as Outlook starts and the CRM Add-in connects up to the CRM server.  Surprise...all those queued up e-mails will be sent.  If all you had was some test e-mail addresses in the data no problem, but what if you had some valid e-mail addresses sitting around...  Usually about 5-10 minutes after this happens and panic sets in "Hey Joe, did you just e-mail a buy 1 get 5 free offer out?".

How can you avoid this? Well there's a few options.  First you could just use the word of mouth approach along with hope and pray and just tell people to not turn on that option.  When you create CRM Users the user is configured by default (at least in CTP3) to route via the CRM Outlook client.  So you could go change that option to route through a non existent e-mail router.  You could also do a mass modification of contacts, and users etc. to invalidate the e-mail addresses.  That approach isn't perfect either because all it takes is someone adding a new valid e-mail address and then another user sending to it.    The reality is you may actually want some e-mails to go out but want to make sure it's to a "white list" of e-mail addresses.

In a normal .NET app we control this by using a common set of code to send e-mails and then it has a white list as well as an always "CC" list so we can ensure we never have an accidental e-mail leakage.  Applying this same thinking to CRM 4 requires a little more thinking because a user could create the e-mail via the UI or it could happen from the web service.  My current thinking is this might be a cool utility plug-in that would validate e-mail activities against a white list. 

What do you think?  How are you handling this problem?  Do you think a generic plug-in that you would install on your dev/test servers would be helpful?