Does anyone else have similar problems?

The OnTime Services is used to check the Alerts, Email and Email Queue. We have a number of accounts and when an email account has an issue the services stops checking that account. We then need to go in and select the email account and then click Check Now. Just about all time things then kick off and away the process goes.

The problem we have is that over night this may stop and our companies around the world then have an issue. They are learning to go in and select and click to kick off the process but it would be good to have this automated.

We have since created a script which will check the database and see when the last time the email was check and if the time recorded is longer than the duration we have against the account an email is generated to one of the support people who then log in and kick off the process.

If anyone knows how we can automate this process I would love to hear from you. This service has been running without a hitch for quite a few months then recently it started to have these issues. (OnTime 2007)

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"The best way to predict the future is to create it" - Peter Drucker

Hello Marc,

The first place you should look it at the Windows Event Log on the server you have the OnTime Email Services installed on. There must be a reason why the POP3 Email service stops automatically checking you account, and your Event Log will most likely give you more information as to why it stopped. Also, you should look in your OnTime Exception Viewer("Help>Exception Viewer") for any exceptions that are logged by OnTime.

So the next time you notice that the Email Services are not automatically checking your POP3 mail accounts, before you manually check the accounts, go take a look at both the Event log and the Exception viewer to see if there's any clues as to the cause. Feel free to send those to support@axosoft.com and we can take a look at them and let you know if we find an explanation.

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Thank you,

Tom Harder
Axosoft Support
support@axosoft.com
1.800.653.0024 option 3
--'Fear the Bug' Podcast--

Hi Marc,

Yes, we have had this problem as well.

I found that the service would often stop if the email address to whom the message was intended wasn't deliverable.

We have actually given up with Emailing from withing OnTime for now, but I am about to test it all again under OnTime 2008.

I hope that it will work properly for us. 

we dont have any issues with the mail system within ontime that works fine. Its just the mail serivce which polls the pop 3 server based on define email accounts. I have checked the event log and sent copies into Axosoft and have had some response but no solution. The problem is that I find an email which had not been processed and then click check now and it go through fine.

 So it is more having some trigger that will just keep trying and if it has multiple issues with the account then email the administrator of the problem.

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"The best way to predict the future is to create it" - Peter Drucker

Hello John-Paul and Marc,

JP, if you find you have issues with OnTime 2008 email,  please send us an email at support@axosoft.com with any related exception error details you can find in "Help>Exception Viewer". We've obviously seen some issues with email in the past depending on the situation, but I'm confident we can find a resolution for you.

And Marc, could you give me the Incident # you've submitted to Support for your email issues so I can review them? I'm curious to see what the status of those was, and if we've exhausted all the possible resolutions in your case. Let me know and I'll take a close look.

 

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Thank you,

Tom Harder
Axosoft Support
support@axosoft.com
1.800.653.0024 option 3
--'Fear the Bug' Podcast--

I have had this problem also.  (I reported under Support, so I'm not sure if that is public ASI06539).  The problem 'seems' to have gone away with 2008, but since it was usually weeks or months between the problem happening, I'm just crossing my fingers at this point.  There was never anything interesting in the Event Log or the OT Exception Viewer.  It happened about 5 times between April and November 2007.  Manually checking the server always got the process up and running again.

Marc - interestingly, I did the same as you, wrote a program that checked the last checked and check interval fields in the OT database and emailed me is something was not right.

 We are also looking at moving away from the email polling, for this and other reasons (spam, sloppy Descriptions that include signatures, etc, and our clients complete inability to reply to the original auto-response but instead send a new email thus creating a new Incident.  We are going to build a very simple web interface using the SDK for them to put in requests and update their requests.
 

I've had this problem as well with the checking of the email accounts. And yes, manualing downloading seems to get it going again.

I've checked the server error log and it has some "Time out" Exceptions. This is using 8.0.1.

Has there been any solutions or fixes to this problem?

What's axosofts view of this - that the email service stops checking emails?

The case I have the service and the pop3 account (with exchange)  are on the same server. Sometimes our server might be under a heavy load, and sometimes the accounts we are checking might have a lot of emails (we don't delete them regularly  - because they might have incorrectly black listed emails).

Is it axosofts view that this is not a bug, and hence we should ask for a feature - that it start checking again some time after an exception like a time out exception (or that it should try a few times before stopping).

Thanks

Malcolm 

For what it is worth, and I imagine its worth very little to Malcolm, I have not had this problem since upgrading to 2008.  I don't know if this just means I've been lucky or my underlying problem was different that Malcolm's.

Hi Everyone, 

We don't have a solution for this problem but are actively looking into the issue. We hope to have a fix or at least a solutions (a notification sent out when service produces an error) for this issue in our next release. If you can think of any pattern that is causing this please reply to this post. Are you noticing its happening to emails that have attachments or spam? Thanks in advance!

I will reply with updates to this post.

Thanks,
Arash

I can only think of things that seem to make it more likely.

There seem to be more cases when the server is under a heavy load. Sometimes it happens when there are no new emails (just old ones which haven't been deleted). Only one of the accounts uses the black list, but more than one fail - so this might mean nothing.

Did you want to see the exception info in case it gave you more details on what part of the process was failing?

Thanks

Malcolm 

Yes, please send me your exception details to arasha@axosoft.com

How often is this happening? How many emails are getting imported on average (daily)?

Thanks,
Arash

For what it's worth, we have also seen the same problem. We have 3 e-mail accounts and we occaissionally find that one has stopped working (could be any 1 of the 3). Using the Check Now function gets it started again.

We have seen no distinct pattern, it seems completely random. We have seen the problem since upgrading to OnTime 2008, although it does seem to happen less often now than it did previously.

Regards,

Brian Raynor

Hi Guys,

Can everyone email me their exception log to help resolve this issue. Malcolm already sent his and we are interested if everyone is getting the same error. Please send to arasha@axosoft.com

Thanks!
Arash

Hi,

We are also experiencing this problem.  Recently I saw a SQL timeout exception in the event log around about the time when the service stopped polling and decided to move the database to another server to see if this gets around the problem.  On the new server I have seen the service log messages in the event log when the SQL server was restarted but I always saw another message being logged stating that it had "Recovered from previously logged errors".  The polling continued after this message was logged.  I never got this recovery message after a timeout exception.

So far the server move has resolved the problem.  I am still trying to determine the original cause of all the SQL time out errors.

 -Charles.