Email settings and troubleshooting

Karishma Updated by Karishma

This article focuses on the interaction between T&A and an SMTP email server. Many of the settings will require input from your local IT department as these will need to be set up on both the T&A side and the email server side.

The "Email" tab

The T&A email settings can be found in both Win T&A (“System”-> “Maintain system preferences”-> “Email” tab) and T&A Web (“System preferences”-> “Email”). These are the basic setting to allow T&A to communicate with the email server.

You can define the following settings:

SMTP settings:

SMTP server – hostname or IP address of the email server

SMTP port – the port the email server listens on (usually port 25 or 587, occasionally 465)

From name – the friendly name emails are sent from. See the “Web” tab section for more information.

From email address – the email address emails are sent from. See the “Web” tab section for more information.

Authentication

SMTP account – account name used to log into the email server.

SMTP password – password used to log into the email server.

Connection security

Use a secure connection – enable this to use an encrypted connection to the email server.

Use STARTTLS – use opportunistic (optional) encryption (if supported by your email server).

Version – which encryption version to use or Negotiate to allow the system to choose on the fly.

The Win T&A Email settings tab also includes a “Test” button that can be used to ensure the above settings work.

The "Web" tab

The “Web” tab (Win T&A-> “System”-> “Maintain system preferences”-> “Web”) includes one further setting that effects the way T&A sends emails – the “Sender address from” setting.

“User” mode – when in this mode, T&A will attempt to impersonate the sender by making the email appear to come from an employee or supervisor. Any emails which are unable to be impersonated will be sent in “SMTP address” mode. An example of this mode would be the email generated when an employee requests an absence; T&A will generate an email that appears to come from the employee that requested the absence.

“SMTP address” mode – when in this mode, T&A will always use the email address specified in the “Email” tab->”From email address” field. Examples of this mode would be any system email, such as Scheduled Messages or Return to Work notifications.

Troubleshooting

(Email could not be sent)

When using T&A Web, you may find that some actions, while successful, have an additional “Email could not be sent” at the end of the success message. You can find further details about the failure by checking the Obtaining "500 internal server error" details page. As you do not receive an error ID, you will need to recreate the error and note down the exact time before checking the error logs.

T&A can send via the Win T&A “Test” button but employee holiday requests are not received.

This is most often seen when migrating to an Office365 solution. The account specified in WinT&A->”System”->”Maintain system preferences”->”Email”->”SMTP account” does not have permissions to impersonate employees as per the “User” mode. This will be accompanied by error logs containing the text

5.2.0 STOREDRV.Submission.Exception:SendAsDeniedException.MapiExceptionSendAsDenied; Failed to process message due to a permanent exception with message Cannot submit message.

This can be resolved by changing the settings on your email server to allow the “SMTP account” to send as any email address. Your IT department will need to make this change.

Alternatively, if you do not mind that employee absence requests come from the T&A system email address, change the “Web” tab->”Sender address from” to be “SMTP account”.

Authentication failed because the remote party has closed the transport stream.

This is most often seen when using Office365. We believe that Microsoft is in the process of turning off TLS1.0, which is causing older versions of T&A Web to fail when sending emails. If you require an updated version of T&A 8, please raise a support ticket.

System.Net.Mail.SmtpException: Failure sending mail. ---> System.IO.IOException: Authentication failed because the remote party has closed the transport stream.

T&A 7 is also effected by this issue, but there is no fix for this within T&A. In order to confirm, you need to turn on logging in the web.config file, see "T&A website extended logging" for information on how to do this. The only known fix for this is to turn off client side TLS 1.0 and 1.1 on the T&A server as per https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/security/tls/tls-registry-settings#tls-dtls-and-ssl-protocol-version-settings

Intermittent email failure

We have seen an intermittent email failure with older versions of T&A 8. The best description that we can give is that, every now and again, a single email will fail. Generally you will be unable to recreate the issue, however, whenever the error happens, it will produce an erro log containing the text.

System.Net.Mail.SmtpException: Failure sending mail. ---> System.IO.IOException: Unable to read data from the transport connection: An established connection was aborted by the software in your host machine.

This has been resolved in T&A 8.36.8.1. If you require an updated version of T&A 8, please raise a support ticket.

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