E-mail Troubleshooting

Symptom: You get a "Mail Server Connection Error" while trying to send a Test Mail.

Possible resolution: This means that the service cannot connect to the specified mail server. It can either be down, not accepting external mail session connections, or unreachable from your current subnet.

First, try to connect to the mail server manually. This is done by running the telnet command from the command prompt on the appropriate Application Server.

The syntax for telnetting to the mail server is: telnet <MAIL SERVER NAME> <LISTENING PORT>

For example, telnet mail.eskowebcenter5.com 25 tries to connect to the mail server mail.eskowebcenter5.com that is listening for mail session connections on port 25.

If the telnet command connects to the server, you should also send a EHLO command in the Command Prompt window, to make sure it is prepared to accept incoming e-mail messages. The Output of the EHLO command should return OK on the last line. If the output return another result, consult your mail server administrator.

Symptom: Sending a Test Mail succeeded but WebCenter notifications are not sent.

Possible resolution: This situation points toward a possible error in notification handling on the client and/or server side. You should first check the Application Server and the Web Server logs for any error messages.

On the Application Server:

On the Web Server:

Note: WebCenter MBean Services will have their own log files in the future.

If you cannot find any suspicious log messages related to any of the notification dispatchment phases, you should also check the JMS E-mail Queue for corrupted messages that block correct messages from being sent.

To check a JMS Queue, open the JBoss admin console that is used to inspect all running JBoss services. To open the admin console, open a browser and point to the following URL: http://<Application Server Host Name>:8086/admin-console/ where <Application Server Host Name> is the host name of the machine that is running the WebCenter JBoss (if it is the current machine, then you can just use localhost).

Note: Even though the JMX console is listening on port 8080 by default, WebCenter uses port 8086.

When you open the admin console, you have to locate the appropriate E-mail Notifications JMS queue, which actually is a JBoss service. It is found at <hostname> > JBossAS Servers > JBoss AS 6 (default) > JMS Manager > JMS Queues > jms.queue.WCRMailQueue. From here you can check how many messages are waiting in the JMS queue (message count). From the control section you can also flush the queue.

An alternate way to flush the queue is disabling e-mail in the WebCenter e-mail settings. If you don't plan to use notifications, e-mail should always be disabled to prevent the mail queue from filling up.

Symptom: If the e-mail notification seems to be sent correctly, but the recipient doesn't receive it:

Possible resolution: This situation indicates that there are issues on the mail server side. The e-mail service within WebCenter is only responsible for connecting to an appropriate mail server and dispatching e-mail message through this connection. Further processes that run on the mail server side are out of the scope of WebCenter. There are several aspects of the mail server configuration that affect if the WebCenter notifications really get sent to the appropriate recipients:

All these issues are determined by the setup of a given mail server, so if you encounter any indications toward such issues, consult the mail server administrator.

But how would you find out what happens on the mail server when the WebCenter mail service communicates with it? There is an option to turn on a debug mode for mail sessions in the Mail Dispatcher MBean.

To do so, open the JMX Console of the running WebCenter JBoss Server and open the management interface of the Mail Dispatcher Mbean (at the bottom of the entire list of registered Mbeans under the section webcenter and service name service=MailDispatcher). Inside the management interface is a List of Mbean Attributes.

Change the DebugSession attribute to TRUE, which will switch the mail session to debug mode.

If you turn on debug mode, the log file on the Application Server will contain a log of the communication between the WebCenter mail server and the mail server. Inspect these extra log messages to see what your problem may be and report the results to the mail server administrator.

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