Testing communication

Document information

Document ID: 4571
Subject: Troubleshooting outbound email problems
Creation date: 12/14/15 4:35 PM
Last modified on: 4/7/22 11:05 AM


Troubleshooting problems related to outbound emails

Outbound emails go through several stages, also called hops, before reaching the final recipient. The image below show these hops

OutboundTroubleShooting.png

Hop#1 John, an in-house user, composes an email to mary@gmail.com. This message goes from John's Outlook to his corporate email server, which is MS Exchange in this example. If something goes wrong at this stage, John will see an error message in his Outlook.

If you're using Xeams in Stand-alone mode, Outlook will have to be configured to send its messages directly to Xeams. In this case, Hop #1 and #2 are same. Click here for instructions on how to configure Outlook.
Hop#2 If something goes wrong at this stage, emails will get queued on your corporate email server, such as Exchange. You will not see the message sent by John in Xeams. Confirm Xeams is running and is successfully listening on port 25 for incoming traffic. You could also see SMTP communication between Exchange and Xeams in SmtpConversation.log.
Hop#3 You will the message sent by John in Live Monitor as well as in the Message Repository. However, they will get stuck in the Outbound Queue of Xeams. Go to Manage Outbound Queue under Message Repository to confirm this.

Following tips will help you troubleshoot emails stuck in the queue:
  • Click the Send Now icon under the Action column to send the email. Xeams will display an error if the message fails to get delivered
  • Refer to SmtpOutboundConversation.log for communication between Xeams and the destination Smtp Server.
  • Refer to either OutboundAuditTrailFailure.log. A successful delivery will cause the a new record to appear in OutboundAuditTrailSuccess.log.
  • Confirm a firewall is not blocking outbound traffic on port 25
  • Confirm traffic for port 25 is not blocked by your ISP
  • Confirm you're running Xeams behind a static IP address. Even if you're IP does not change, running an email server behind an IP classified as dynamic address will cause your emails to get blocked.
Hop#4 If the see the message in OutboundAuditTrailSuccess.log, that guarantees Xeams has been able to successfully deliver the message and now the ball is in the other server's court. The receiving server will have their own filtering mechanisms and may decide to block your email.

We recommend you run Tools/Diagnostic Check - Outbound and confirm your Xeams is configured correctly to send out-bound messages.


User comments

Posted by David Johnson on 5/26/16 11:00 PM

A follow up on this as I got to the bottom of my issue. The issue was because the MTU size of the Ethernet interface was set too high. It needed to be lower than the default 1500 setting and fragmentation was not happening to some of the domains. Setting it to a lower value, meant that the packets could now get through to the mail servers for the other domains and the queue was quickly proceed. Just another thing to watch out for.


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