This page helps with problems relating to the automated email interfaces that exist inside Gds. These are used to receive and process information directly from trading partners, send receipts and purchase orders and general machine to machine communication.
These instructions WILL NOT help you to diagnose user level email sending and receiving problems such as Outlook or Thunderbird. Contact your IT or ISP support staff for problems with these programs
Not Receiving Emails
- Are you receiving some emails but not others?
- Check intervening email spam filters and anti virus tools that scan email. The messages may appear too large or suspect to these filters. Some automated tools send email with "Reply-To" header empty (which is permitted by the standards) but spam programs treat this as a risk facter.
- Consider adding the sender to "whitelists"
- Are you sharing the email account with interactive users? This is not generally reliable as depending on email programs in use, reading the email in a client program can mean it is not longer visible to Gds.
- Gds reads email using the POP3 protocol. It does not use IMAP. Exchange servers can be configured to allow POP3 to individual machines (rather than opening for all users). Instructions are on Microsofts website.
Not Sending Emails
Tip: If the account has been sending correctly in the past and suddenly stops working, do not attempt to reconfigure the account until the cause is isolated. Reconfiguring the account as a first step will usually just make troubleshooting harder.
- Browse to the systems messaging configuration page. (Email, Configure Accounts). Press "View Log" which shows the log of SMTP while communicating to the email server. If the email server is not reachable or logging errors (eg password has changed) they will show here. Errors showing in the log are generally due to external factors and should be addressed using tools outside Fieldpine.
- Press the "test" button and try to send an email to a known account. This can take a few moments to process. Once you have sent the test email, continue to "view log" until after you have seen it work.
How Emails are Queued
Sometimes the problems with not sending emails relates to getting the "send email" command to the server rather than the email account directly. The following outlines the technical flow of how emails are queued and routed.
- A program in your retail network decides it needs to create an email. This might be a checkout deciding to email a receipt or a statement run emailing a statement or many other causes.
- The program generates a Business Transaction "send email" and places all the details inside the command. This command is queued to master servers using the same technique as many other transactions. Retail programs do not generally send email directly themselves.
Common Steps
These steps apply for both sending and receiving problems.
- Is the site generally able to send and receive emails (eg via Outlook etc). It is not always obvious if the site has general email problems as outgoing email is buffered and the user is not aware of this fact. If the site has general email problems, then Gds will be unikely to process either.
- Are the programs enabled in network firewalls to access the network. Connections to email TCP ports are a red flag to some
anti virus tools. The programs that may connect to the email ports are (depending on site and installation versions)
- RptCommsAgent.exe
- Messaging.exe
- GlobalData.exe
- rundll32.exe
- Are you using Stunnel (or similar) to provide SSL translation? Is it working? (It is generally very reliable) It has a seperate logging window to record problems it is having.
- Are you not using SSL and your ISP is now enforcing SSL? Some ISPs switched and mandated SSL for email. Typically you receive a letter a few months before they enforce it. Contact your ISP to see if this might apply and if so you need to install an SSL translator such as stunnel.
- Fieldpine messaging does not embed SSL into our code directly, we rely on external tools, or Windows, which is safer than us forcing you to specific protocol versions
Txt messaging can use different providers to actually send the Txt message. Determine the provider from the configuration page and select the relevant section below
Email Gateway
NZ. Spark eTxt
The Txt interface consists of sending a formatted email to a specific email address. If it is not sending or working, then:
- Check the email account setup. Try a test message to yourself to verify email generally working.
- Use the email "test" function to send a manually formatted txt message
- If emails are leaving your system, check with your Telecommunications company or review any bounce emails you may be receiving
Fieldpine Gateway
The Fieldpine gateway can use different options to connect to the SMS switch. In general it connects to an Internet address and sends a message via a restricted API
If the current status is showing "Unable to send message. Registration still in progress", this means the setup information has not yet processed. Verify your machine can connect to the Internet (it needs to communicate to Fieldpine.com). The registration process can take up to 2 working days to complete. If your registration is still pending after 2 days, email support@fieldpine.com