SMTP on non-production environments

[JoePriest]

During our GSO engagement for our Windchill implemtation, they set up James Mail on our development server to catch all outgoing emails from that system. You could then open Outlook on that server and see all of the email that went out from Windchill. After looking at their setup, it's not as easy as just installing James Mail and configuring Windchill to point to it. There was some heavy configuration/customization for them to get it working. I have tried Tech Support and they didn't have a clue on how to help me with this since it's "a GSO thing".

I don't want to have our email going through out enterprise SMTP server on our non-production environments and sending emails out to users unintentionally. I also don't want to take the hardline approach of disabling the email queue on Windchill. That defeats the purpose of testing email functions.

What have you guys done to deal with email on non-production environments?

Thanks.

Joe

[ddemay]

PostCast Server Free Edition 2.6.0. Do not download latest version.

Set it up to not resolve to valid DNS or mail port.

After awhile, asks you to register. But since it has invalid dns, register fails and you use as usual. It is free they just like to know who is using it.

Been using almost 7 years.

If you run into install issues skip do not abort and then there is a fix posted on site.

Set wt.mail properties to point here.


Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

[achukwuka]

James,

In my time supporting Windchill, we made a decision not to have mails going out to users from non production environments, since users were getting confused about the emails they get from the dev/test servers. We only enable emails when we need to test email functionality and disable it afterwards. There is no recommended approach, it's really up to you and your business to decide.

Thanks

Alexius C. Chukwuka
IT Analyst, Global SAP Basis
Technical Change Management (TCM)
Deere & Company World Headquarters
400 19th St, Moline, IL 61265
Office: (309) 765-3133
Mobile: (319) 429-5336

[imendiola]

Hi,

sometimes I have used this very simple SMTP server: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jmailsrv/

You can configure lo listen at any port, and you can run it on any computer. You have to configure Windchill to use that computer IP and port in the mailserver configuration property. It will create a file for each email message with extension .msg, but if you rename it to .eml you can open it using for example Outlook Express and you can view the email message.

The only problem is that it only works for 1 domain when it is started. In its configuration file you hve to specify wich mail domain will be used. For example, if you use "ptc.com", you will see as files all the emails sent by Windchill to any - email address. But other mail messages will be lost.

Regards

Iker Mendiola

Prambanan IT Services
http://www.prambanan-it.com

[mmeadows]

Adding to the list of mail server solutions, I use hMailServer (http://www.hmailserver.com/) on Windows test and training instances. It is freeand has a GUI which makes it easier (for me) to configure than James Mail Server.It took me an hour to figure it out the first time and now I can set it up in less than 10 minutes. However, it is Windows only. Let me know if you want to try it. I can share the configuration instructions (screen shots).

For development/training environments I configure the hosts file so emails don't go anywhere except the server (e.g. 127.0.0.1 mail.mytestserver.com). I set up my email client (Thunderbird) on the serverwith the necessary mail accounts. That way I can test and validate functionality without end users getting emails from the test environment.

For staging/test/production environments I have set up hMailServer to be a mail relay to my gmail account but you could configure it to relay to your corporate mail server. Configured as a relay, it can bridge the functionality gap for Windchill 10.0 and earlier which don't support SSL mail servers.

FYI: All of this can be done with the James Mail Server if you know how to configure it. The James Mail Server that GSO sets up may be the same as what you get from the Apache web site. GSO uses a customization on the Windchill side to extract all users from Windchill and create email accounts for them in James Mail Server. It is a great time saver but it is only available from GSO and I don't know if it would work with any other mail server flavor.

When I configure my mail server with an SMTP username and password I use blat (http://www.blat.net/) to send emails from the OS, database, and backup scripts. Yeah, it is ancient (2003) but it is free and works great. It works without SMTP username and password too but so do other tools.

Kind Regards,

Matt Meadows

Solutions Architect
VIRSO Inc
O: 618 937 8115
C: 314 749 8377
E: mmeadows@virsoinc.com

[LewisLawrence]

Folks,

We take a slightly different approach to emails from the Windchill test environments. When we refresh our development and prototype environments, we initially stop all the queues from processing. Then we delete all the running workflows we know would otherwise be sending out email alerts as part of a schedule. They are easily filtered by name and the delete runs pretty quickly, this also saves us resources in the test environments.

Additionally we have modified the email template in those environments so that the subject of any emails starts “[non production] “, so that when we are testing and emails go out to whoever, they know that if they are not participating in the testing it is not anything they need to be concerned with.

The sad fact is that many of our users have email filtering rules set to delete anything sent by the Windchill server in any case (production or otherwise), and at the same time there are many users who rely on the emails to direct them to their assignments, so we have to keep the email alerts on.

We are on 9.1, does anyone know if there is an enhancement in a later release to allow individual users a little more control of their notification settings?

-----

Lewis

[MikeLockwood]

Some good discussion on this...

Just FYI for anyone new to this.
Back in the early days of us getting ready to go to Windchill (~ 7 years ago), I made the mistake of getting a workflow process into an infinite loop* on a test Windchill system on the production network using the production email, and caused about 40,000 emails to be sent on the production network before we figured out how to shut it down cleanly. This resulted in many more discussions than normal starting with "...your replacement..." - and we were sternly warned to "...be more careful and prevent this sort of thing in the future."

So, definitely a good idea to have a non-production email system and constrain what goes out from a non-production Windchill system.

* This can easily be done by accident by:
- Configure a lifecycle with a workflow on the first state (e.g. as all Change Objects are OTB)
- In that workflow, have a set state robot to the first state (not a good idea)

[AL_ANDERSON]

We also take a copy of production to refresh our non production systems.

Before starting up that copy, we export the LDAP on the non production
system (that was copied from production during the refresh), change all
e-mails to the same administrative account (we use Lotus Notes, and we can
set up an Admin account), and then import those changes to that non
production system. We then turn on the non-production system so that all
non-production e-mails can be checked in that Lotus Notes admin account
for testing, but otherwise can be ignored without having to disable the
e-mail system. When some number of users have to perform UAT on one of
those development systems, then we update just those testers' e-mails on
the non-production box for the duration of the test, then change them back
when we are done. For a small number of testers, we do the update
manually. For a large number of testers, we use the LDAP
export/change/import method.

Al Anderson