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Email issues (login credentials)

Email issues (login credentials)

by Subasa Nguyen -
Number of replies: 4
Hello everyone,

We are having some issues with students enrolled in our WebWork courses.

We have roughly 2200 students enrolled in several Math courses on our WebWork system.

Our webwork system is on a VM - Debian host / 4 vCPUs / 16GB RAM.
It is configured to use our SMTP which is on another server.

Recently, the TAs have reported their students are not receiving the login credentials sent via WebWork.

From time to time, when we sent the login creds to a single course, the students would get their login creds in an email, and the TA who sent it received a confirmation email with this content:

"A message with the subject line
WebWork MATH_203 Login information
has been sent to
767 recipient(s) in the class Math_203_Fall_2017.
There were 0 message(s) that could not be sent."

But most of the time, neither this summary email comes back, nor the students receiving anything.

I have a couple of questions:

1. If assuming something is throttling/deferring the sending of these emails, do webwork attempt a couple of times to send? Or it's just 1 time, if it fails that is it?

2. Are there email logs / error logs that I can look at to know exactly what's going on? What is the location of those logs?

Thank you,


Sava
In reply to Subasa Nguyen

Re: Email issues (login credentials)

by Michael Gage -
Are you using rel 2.13 or an earlier version? There were some changes in the recent release in order to switch from deprecated CPAN email modules to the current versions.
In reply to Michael Gage

Re: Email issues (login credentials)

by Subasa Nguyen -
Hi Michael,

We're using 2.10. It was a fresh install back in 2015.
Without upgrading to the later releases, is there anyway I can fix this issue?

Thank you,


In reply to Subasa Nguyen

Re: Email issues (login credentials)

by Arnold Pizer -
Hi,

Check with the administrator of your SMTP server who can review the logs on that machine for information. You might also want to look at the Apache error log on your WeBWorK server.

Arnie
In reply to Arnold Pizer

Re: Email issues (login credentials)

by Michael Gage -
If this was working before (last year) then it almost certainly a change in the SMTP server that is causing this error. SMTP servers come in many varieties and often have periodic security updates that can affect their interaction with with applications sending mail.

The items in the forum that you obtain by searching for $tls_allowed all refer to attempts to stabilize connections with SMTP servers but they involve versions 2.11 and especially 2.13 so they don't apply to your case.

In answer to your question about whether WeBWorK actually checks whether an email has been successfully delivered the answer is no. In recent versions there is some extra checking to make sure that the connection to the SMTP server was successful but nothing to check that the mail was actually delivered.