10.3 and 3.1 Exchange 2010 - Connection Timeout in socketmail log with Email Queue Emails
Problem
We are still having email issues and need some additional trouble-shooting tips.
Solution
First, we asked the customer to provide VSI with this info:
1 Are you attempting to use the email queue for sending email or not?
2 What kind of email server is RecTrac trying to send the requests to?
3 Is the email server local to your LAN or farmed out to a 3rd party or offsite?
4 Are there any SMTP or relay timeout settings on your email server that you are aware of?
5 Historically we only recommend use of the email queue in RecTrac for WebTrac receipts or password retrieval. We do not recommend for large volume RecConnect emailing because it could take a long time to send, particularly if there were attachments. If using the queue, do you know what areas of RecTrac/WebTrac the queue is being used for?
Next, we turned the client debug on (CTRL-F8) and looked at the socketemail log for an email sent linked to an email device without queuing turned ON. There was a 'connection timeout' at the end and you could see it came at 30 seconds.
The solution was that a setting in Exchange 2010 needed to be changed. The setting is called the 'Acknowledgement Delay'. The default appears to be 30 seconds and some exchange administrators may set to higher value. The problem is RecTrac is hardcoded for 30 seconds max so in many cases, the timing won't work. The email may go but RecTrac thinks it didn't. It's not a problem if NOT queuing since the system doesn't retry. But if queuing, the system tries to keep sending.
The person that administers the Exchange server went to a power shell on the Exchange server and did a similar command as below.
Set-ReceiveConnector 'SMTP Application relay' -MaxAcknowledgementDelay 00:0015
where 'SMTP Application relay' is the one they use to allow the relay for RecTrac, and 00:00:15 is the changed setting to 15 seconds
See MS technet article: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh529935%28v=exchg.141%29.aspx for additional information.