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Bill Ziemer - send feedback problems

Bill Ziemer - send feedback problems

by Arnold Pizer -
Number of replies: 0
inactiveTopicsend feedback problems topic started 9/15/2005; 9:25:58 PM
last post 9/18/2005; 4:40:27 PM
userBill Ziemer - send feedback problems  blueArrow
9/15/2005; 9:25:58 PM (reads: 446, responses: 4)
When students send instructor feedback, the system says sent successfully but no email actually gets delivered. There is no error in the apache log. Is this a problem with the smtp server? (global.conf has the smtpserver variable set correctly, and we are running 2.1.3)

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userDavide P. Cervone - Re: send feedback problems  blueArrow
9/15/2005; 10:01:45 PM (reads: 515, responses: 0)
Can you check the mail queue to see if things are piling up there for some reason? Or the mail.log file to see if it looks like things have been sent out, or if there are errors there? It sounds like WeBWorK thinks it has passed the messages to the mail system, so perhaps there is something going wrong with the mail after WeBWorK is no longer involved.

Davide

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userBill Ziemer - Re: send feedback problems  blueArrow
9/16/2005; 11:54:26 AM (reads: 519, responses: 0)
maillog shows no errors, the mail queue is empty, mailstats shows 14 rejected emails to esmtp out of 3670.

I am unclear on the mechanism webwork uses to send email. Does it use the perl module Mail::Sender which in turn uses sendmail?

After some tests, some emails go forth, but not all. It appears that only emails with a domain name that is not our campus domain go through. That appears to point to the campus smtp server.

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userMichael Gage - Re: send feedback problems  blueArrow
9/16/2005; 1:22:24 PM (reads: 504, responses: 0)
Bill,

I seem to recall that we had some trouble of this type some time ago because the server was either slow, or set so that it purposely set so that it wouldn't accept too many messages at once from one sender. (The latter might be done to prevent the server from being used to relay spam.) You might check with whoever is running the mail server to see if this is true in your case.

We ended up using a different mail server which was more tolerant of receiving several e-mails at once.

YMMV

-- Mike

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userBill Ziemer - Re: send feedback problems  blueArrow
9/18/2005; 4:40:27 PM (reads: 488, responses: 0)
It appears that the issue was stale DNS data. The campus did a major network reorg. over the summer.

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