Best practice forum (Archived)

Hi Hannah

I understand that you can't!

Last year we had the same issue  problem with determining if F2F emails had been sent and our IT support vendor build us a prototype mail log viewer. Happy to share if this is of use - text desrcibing it's functionaility below.

Cheers
Austen

<snip>

I've attached a screenshot of the prototype mail log viewer. As described above, it's a pretty basic but functional interface:

1. Access limited only to System Administrators

2. Searchable fields are username, "to" address, time sent, subject line, whether or not the message was sent successfully, and the error message if there is one. All the text fields are wildcard-based rather than exact matching, as you can see in the screenshot where I've typed in "booking" and it matches "Course booking cancellation".

3. For each email, it displays the username (with a link to the user's profile), "to" address, time sent, subject line, success status, and error message

4. On the back end, I've made it log all the parameters to the email_to_user() function. So, we could additionally display these if you want:

  -  "from" address
  -  message in text format
  -  message in html format (if any)
  -  attachment local filename (if any)
  -  attachment filename as listed in the email
  -  "replyto" address
  -  word wrap width

I left those out of the page, thinking that if you run a report and it gives you back 10,000 emails or whatever, the page is more likely to load successfully if it isn't listing all those message bodies (since those could be large). But if you want to see the message bodies as well, I can add those back in to the report page.

As we discussed on the phone, it also comes with a cron component that deletes records from the table that are more than 7 days old.

</snip>

Thanks Austen for the information on viewing the emails sent. Emails get sent out depending on the settings on Totara for the message.

Email messages are generally sent out periodically when the cron job is automatically run. For example a forum message will not be immediately sent out when you press send. Firstly there are setting on the forum activity that you can change to allow you a specified number of minutes before the message is sent. Secondly the cron job that sends forum messages is run - this job is usually run every five minutes.

As far as the creation of a program goes the message content is controlled by the messages tab and this not be sent until the program cron job for this is run - (I think this is less frequently than every five minutes)

Craig