SMTP Troubleshooting

Updated: September  2024

Audience: Everyone

Summary

Sometimes, customers need to receive specific or all emails from Jama Connect®. Here are some steps you can take to troubleshoot those issues.

Troubleshooting Guide

General Configuration:

First, it is essential to rule out any misconfiguration within the Jama Connect Root menu. You can verify by logging in as root and navigating to System Properties > General Properties.

You can use the 'Test Email' button to check whether the configuration is correct. SMTP must be enabled, a valid "From" address must exist, and the SMTP host must resolve correctly.

Next, we want to review logging for more information. Failed emails will be reported in the contour.log. Such as: '0 emails were sent successfully, and one (1) email(s) failed to be sent



Many times, the messages we receive need to be more descriptive. They may need more details or context, leaving us unsure of their intended meaning.

2022-08-23 14:46:21,468 INFO QuartzScheduler_Worker-82 jamadev [com.jamasoftware.contour.service.impl.NotificationServiceImpl] - 0 email(s) were sent successfully and 1 email(s) failed to be sent. Turn on debug to see per-email errors.In the event of that, we can turn on more robust logging.

To obtain additional details, we can enable more extensive logging. 

More Robust Logging

In the logging section of the root admin page, two packages can be helpful to add and set as DEBUG:
com.jamasoftware.contour.service.impl.MailServiceImpl
com.jamasoftware.contour.service.impl.NotificationServiceImpl
You may have to add these packages manually.

With these packages enabled, we will have much more insight into why these are failing. Including, in some cases, specific status codes which you can cross-reference with a guide such as https://www.mailersend.com/blog/smtp-codes

Additional Steps

We must dig deeper if something needs to be more useful in the logging. There are a few places to continue checking. The first is /var/log/mail.log on the application server, but that is not always true. The second is on the database itself with the email table.

For example, you can use SELECT * FROM email WHERE status != "sent"; to show the status of emails that aren't showing as status 'sent' to see if they failed or are pending.