Hi

Where are Mails going, if Mailserver is offline and Agent does Reply to a ticket?

We are using an external SMTP Server and noticed, that replies are not sent, when they where done during a mailserver downtime.

To reproduce:

  • Block SMTP Access to Mailserver on Firewall
  • Reply on a Ticket
  • Renenable SMTP Access to Maiserver on Firewall
  • The Reply done during the time, when Mailserver was not reachable will never arrive

I would expect some local Queueing in such a case and when Mailserver is reachable again, the mail in the queues get send out.

I didn't find anything in the documentation about it and also no actual infos in the forum.

Did I miss something?

Regards

Patrick

    Hi Patrick,

    Its actually basic mail server functions at that point. No mailserver means mail is not delivered. There is no queue on osTicket as its a basic function of a mail server itself to ensure deliver-ability. Not sure if it changes when you use the built in mailer function. The people that wrote it could answer that more.

    If your agents respond to a ticket through SCP, then the updates are logged to the ticket as normal but again the email notifications would not go out since the mail server is down.

    @pstuder

    A Queueing System is something we hope to add to v2.0. The current codebase has no concept of queueing system and it'd be an entire project in itself.

    Cheers.

    pstuder Where are Mails going, if Mailserver is offline and Agent does Reply to a ticket?

    The answer depends on a number of variables on how things are setup.
    The short version is:
    Yes, if the mail server is completely down and the system tries to send mail, it goes into oblivion.

    What is the best way to handle something like this?
    I think that depends on scale and what someone's [or their companies] fault tolerance is for failure (my brain translates that to how mission critical something is).

    Some options are:

    • add a message queuing system to osTicket.
    • have more than one mail server behind something like a virtual ip with load balancing and down detection.
    • do both
    • use a hosted email solution (such as O365) where they are already doing clusters of mailservers.
      [note: this will not eliminate the issue entirely as you could still connect to a mailserver that is malfunctioning, but it does greatly mitigate the risk.]

    There could be other options, but I think that you get the idea. 🙂

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