Every now and again (months apart) we get a “Your SMTP settings are deactivated” email stating that the last 3 consecutive attempts to send items failed, and we have to go in and reactivate. Most recently, I received this 2minutes (10:51 today) after QF had successfully generated and sent an email (I know it was successful because I received an immediate response from the recipient).
I checked the email log in QF. All emails within the last month show as SENT. Process time sometimes as high as 3secs and occasionally much higher but nothing consistently bad, and not very recently. I am not aware of any emails that have not been sent.
Any idea why we received this notification? If it was to do with incorrect interaction with our email provider, why would the QF email log show as SENT?
In regards to emails 3 seconds can be a little lengthy. What I suspect may be happening is that the mail server isn’t responding in a timely fashion, so as far as we can tell, it’s failed, but actually it’s sent and not told us.
There may be a clue in your event log - does anything show there?
When viewing the email in your email log, you should see the SMTP server at the top. Is the one shown your custom SMTP server?
Event Log reports the email sent at 10:49 then next entry at 10:51 logs the three consecutive errors message. The email at 10:49 took only 0.29secs to process according to the Sent Email Log.
I think you have something with the smtp server shown though I have no idea what it means. All the other emails show the expected SMTP:smtp.livemail.co.uk but that one email immediately before the error message showed SMTP:SESAPI. Do you know what that means? Thanks.
Edit - just found we had the same problem back in Dec 2021 where I contributed to a thread. The problem appears to be unresolved there.
SESAPI is our default sending method, so it would have been sent using the default from address and mail server.
What this does mean, however, is that if the email failed to send using your SMTP settings, it was still sent using the default settings, so it wasn’t dropped.
Let me send you a private message and see if can offer any insight here. Email is a bit of a minefield, but we’ll have a look
Perhaps the best thing would be to not have the SMTP settings automatically disable, have an error message sent to the user every time an email cannot be sent but it be up to the user to have to go in to QF email settings and disable SMTP manually? Whether the email that should have been sent gets sent by SESAPI or not automatically (upon SMTP failure) could be a user setting within the QF SMTP settings (e.g. “Upon SMTP failure, send email using default QuickFile (SESAPI) email server? Y/N”).
What just seems to be non-ideal is that a brief blip with communications between QF and the SMTP server turns off the SMTP settings permanently and requires the user to go in and re-input the SMTP password/settings to turn it on again.
I’m not too passionate about the problem but always nice to have an explanation. I guess we just put up with it. It does not happen often and appears to be a brief temporary blip either with fasthosts or QF email server.
