Why aren’t my email alerts delivered?
Q: I set up email alerts. However, they are silently not delivered. Why can that happen?
A: There may be several reasons why email messages are not delivered. Let’s start with sending test email message from Tools -> Settings -> Email Settings page.
Proceed to the above settings tab and check SMTP server parameters (whether they are set correctly). If they are, click on «Send test email alert».
Please pay attention to a new pop-up appearing after that. The new pop-up window contains recorded mail server conversation log (what has been sent to SMTP server and server responses). Its contents can provide information on what went wrong. If everything was fine, the last line in the conversation log will be string «Message was sent successfully» on green background.
Typical error situations are listed below.
- Message has been sent successfully, but test email was not seen in mailbox. How to solve: please check that
- the recipient email address doesn’t discard incoming email
- message isn’t in spam folders/other folders where it could be moved automatically (by spam or other custom filters)
- Authentication error or «relaying not permitted» error was reported in the mail server conversation log. How to solve: make sure you specify correct authentication data (user name and password) to send email message.
- Connecting or authentication phase (first several lines of conversation log) times out — conversation logs stops soon after start, mail sending does not happen. How to solve: check that
- communication with SMTP server is not blocked on SMTP server side (by firewall or other filters)
- Windows firewall allows to communicate with SMTP server (try disabling Windows firewall for short duration and send test alert email again to check)
- Internet guard software (e.g. Symantec, McAfee, Kaspersky, Comodo or other content control/firewall solutions) blocks communication with SMTP server — whitelist NMSService.exe and NMSClient.exe processes at such Internet guard software to allow sending email alerts
If all the above was tried, but the problem still persists, please contact SMTP server administrator, mail server log files may contain information on why email is not passing through.
