Best practice forum (Archived)

Scheduled Report, Course Reminder, Forum Emails NOT sending - ERROR

Hi,

Our production site (v1.1.3) is failing to send out any emails:

Course Reminders
Scheduled Reports
Forum Digests

When running the cron script I can see these errors:

Processing 2 scheduled reports

ERROR: The following From address failed: VPLH-ADMIN@police.vic.gov.au

Failed to send email for report 13

done.

Starting the reminder cron...

Processing reminder "CIM Mentally Ill Feedback" for course "Critical Incidents Involving the Mentally Ill" (13)

ERROR: The following From address failed: VPLH-ADMIN@police.vic.gov.au

Could not send email to #####@police.vic.gov.au

0 "invitation" type messages sent

1 "invitation" type messages failed

ERROR: The following From address failed: VPLH-ADMIN@police.vic.gov.au

Could not send email to #####@police.vic.gov.au

0 "reminder" type messages sent

1 "reminder" type messages failed

ERROR: The following From address failed: VPLH-ADMIN@police.vic.gov.au

Could not send email to #####@police.vic.gov.au

Could not send email to #####@police.vic.gov.au's manager

0 "escalation" type messages sent

2 "escalation" type messages failed

done

The from address (VPLH-ADMIN@police...) is an actual email address. Also I have tried changing and removing all the reply address from the Site Admin > Server > Email settings page, but I still get the same error.

Is there a way to fix this in v1.1.3?

Is this a bug that was fixed in later versions?

Thanks,

-Ira

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Hi Ira,

No we haven't seen this one before so I don't think it's been fixed in a more recent release.

Was this working before and recently stopped, or is the first time you've tried to get mail working? If it's stopped, has anything changed, either with your moodle configuration or your mail server configuration?

There is a post here with some suggestions you could try:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=143978

You could also try turning email debugging on via Site Admin > Debugging > Debug email sending and see if you get any more detailed errors.

There are also various forum posts related to the error you are seeing with PHPMailer which is what totara uses to handle emails. Some of them mention ensuring the SMTP server has permission to send email from the specified address.

Simon

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Hi,

The error seems to have started after our server upgrade/migration.

The Debug Email setting gave me the same Error as the one listed in the Cron script.

It appears the issue was that the new server IP address was not in the "allowed" mail relay list. So it seemed to be an Environment issue mixed and not a Totara LMS issue .

-Ira

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Hi Ira,

Glad you got it sorted.

Simon

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Hello Ira, Simon,

We've encountered this (or a very similar issue) with our Moodle installations a while ago on some servers from one day to the other. Hope this input helps!

One server was a VPS at Aktiom Network LLC and the other "server" were most of our CloudSites at RackspaceCloud after they migrate to a new datacenter.

I found this interesting post regarding what may be behind this issue http://ogre.ikratko.com/archives/148

In both cases using SMTP solved the issue but SMTP may be an issue with mass emails.

I opened a ticket at both ends.

Aktiom LLC solved the issue with the following comment from support:

"Looking at your SMTP logs, I do not see any authorization failures for xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. qmail was set to delay SMTP connection for a few seconds and this might have prevented PHP on xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx from successfully making an SMTP connection. I have removed the connection delay so connection are now immediate. Please try to send an email from moodle on xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx again."

RackspaceCloud support unfortunaly did not excel on this and did not provide any solutions, just a lot of preformed answers.

In this case we ended up using http://sendgrid.com/ and use SMTP.

If able I recommend contacting your server's support team with this info to see if this can help you debug the issue.

Hope you are able to solve it! Let us know how things end up.

Best, Franco.

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