jawood2005's picture
jawood2005 - Wed, 2011/08/17 - 01:21

Fun chronology:

1. I downloaded the Turnkey OTRS appliance and have been running it via VirtualBox for a few weeks to learn the system. I have, as such, learned the system decently well.

2. I demo'd the software to my boss and we decided to go live with this build.

3. We launched the Amazon cloud version of the Turnkey OTRS build.

4. Email notifications (one of the simplest things to implement on the VirtualBox) will not work. Everything seemed to go well until I realized that no email notification were going out. I did nothing differently between the two builds with either Auto Responses or Notification(Events). Registering users don't even get emails containing their passwords.

So what I'm trying to find out here is what I can do to enable email notifications on the Amazon cloud distro of Turnkey/OTRS. I've been through pages of SysConfig options and have been poring through files via Webmin and have not found it yet.

Thank you so much for your help, and if I need to ask this elsewhere, please let me know.

Forum: 
Support
Tags: 
cloud
notification
Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Wed, 2011/08/17 - 07:39

My first thought would be that perhaps you need to open ports in AWS (although I would think that this is already handled by TKL Hub but not 100% sure).

Another possibility that comes to mind is that the IP has been blacklisted by your ISP/email provider (due to previous spammer using the IP) and thus treating them as malicious/spam. If thats the case you may need to consider contacting your ISP/email provider and get it whitelisted.

I'd first double check the availability of the ports by checking internally (netstat) whether the ports are open in your TKL OTRS (although they should be no worries). Then I'd do a remote port scan of your OTRS install either from your local computer or using something like ShieldsUp (google it).

If that confirms everything is as it should be then I'd contact your ISP/email provider and see if they can give you any info.

Jeremiah's picture

Jeremiah - Wed, 2011/08/17 - 15:46

Does /var/log/mail.log reveal anything about what is happening to the email notifications?

jawood2005's picture

jawood2005 - Wed, 2011/08/17 - 18:30

According to the system log and the mail log, the notifications are being sent. They're just not being received. Our email is all taken care of by GMail, and we've had no trouble with receiving messages from anything/anyone else, so I doubt it's that. Thanks for your help, though.

Jeremiah's picture

Jeremiah - Wed, 2011/08/17 - 19:53

 

I assume you are using postfix for sending email from your server.  If that's true then your log for an outgoing notification should probably look something like this.
 
Aug 17 12:46:44 email postfix/smtp[401]: B430C10F81ED: to=<testuser@mydomain.com>, relay=ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM[74.125.47.27]:25, delay=1.9, delays=0.06/0.02/0.37/1.4, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 OK 1313599604 v45si4265076yhd.54)
 
If the "relay" is a Google server and the "status" equals "sent" then from my experience that means Google has received the notification.  It could be that it ended up in the spam folder but you probably already thought of that.
 
Can you post a cleaned up mail log entry for one of the failed notifications?
jawood2005's picture

jawood2005 - Wed, 2011/08/17 - 20:02

I think this is what you're looking for:

 

 

Aug 16 14:22:06 otrs postfix/smtp[6584]: EC7D46FB: to=<[my address]>, relay=gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[74.125.113.27]:25, delay=0.76, delays=0.07/0/0.58/0.1, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 OK 1313504526 dp9si211723vdb.148)
Jeremiah's picture

Jeremiah - Wed, 2011/08/17 - 20:22

Yep, it does look like the email is getting delivered correctly.  Are you sure it's not in the spam folder or possibly being caught by a filter in the Gmail account?  If that's not the case then I'm not sure what to tell you.  If Gmail servers are receiving the notification but your Gmail account doesn't have it then my guess is this has nothing to do with it being an Amazon EC2 instance.

Something else you may want to consider if you haven't already is assigning an elastic ip address and reverse dns entry for that server.  You may also need to request to remove email sending limitations from Amazon.   That doesn't seem to be causing the current problem but it might in the future.  You'd have to fill out this form here  https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/html-forms-controller/contactus/ec2-email-limit-rdns-request

jawood2005's picture

jawood2005 - Wed, 2011/08/17 - 21:41

I've been sending to multiple GMail accounts (some corporate, others personal) and none of them have shown up in Spam or any other folders. Maybe they're all just being waylayed somewhere...stinking intertubes...

Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Thu, 2011/08/18 - 04:22

Have a look at some of these links (I'm sure google can provide you with many more):

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=80369
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=82460

and/or consider submitting this form:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=msgdelivery

In my googling I came across a couple of paragraphs relating to submitting that form which seemed like sound advice and I have re-stated it here:

Provide only what they ask, and do not complain. Just provide the requested details and drop a note of thanks into the additional information field. I suspect they receive 100’s of these a day, so be nice and wait.

Unlike some ISP’s, I rarely get a reply from Gmail. The issue simply resolves or not. I find them one of the more difficult email providers to deal with regarding email blacklisting practices.

Another option may be to just backup your server, destroy it and start again (with a new IP) and hope for the best. Good luck...

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