Inadequate Warning of Failed Send

[lawfulsoftware]

We have had trouble sending an email to a particular recipient. It has twice failed however all other emails send without issue. I will try to diagnose the reason that it is not able to send.

The user had no idea that the message did not send. There should be some kind of persistent prominent warning to tell the user that an email could not send so the user can check the email and fix it.

The only indication of a problem is this notification in the email conversation:

[freescout-helpdesk]

There should be some kind of persistent prominent warning to tell the user that an email could not send so the user can check the email and fix it.

What else can you suggest?

Also see https://github.com/freescout-helpdesk/freescout/wiki/FAQ#how-can-support-team-know-that-there-are-problems-with-sending-emails-and-emails-are-not-being-sent

[lawfulsoftware]

I do not see where there is an option to be "notified by email on Send Errors." The only option appears to be for fetch errors. Additionally, the alert mentioned in paragraph 2 did not appear. No emails were sent to the administrator advising of the send error.

There have been several such errors and not all of them have generated the red notification in my first message.

The failed emails all included an attachment of some sort.

A one-week resending period is generally not helpful; an email server should not be down for more than 24 hours. A notification should be sent within an hour or two if something is preventing an email from being sent. The current "App\Jobs\SendReplyToCustomer" queue is at 75 for one email and 74 for another email. I have not received any warnings.

A one-hour delay is probably too long. Users and recipients expect emails to transmit almost instantly. A five-minute or ten-minute retry period would be better and there should be an indication to the user that the message is stuck and has not been sent.

It should be possible to set a time after which the system sends a notification to the admin. Ideally, it would be possible to call a webhook.

[lawfulsoftware]

Further to this, it would be nice if we could set a backup SMTP server which will be automatically tried when the primary fails. I will also post this as a feature request.

[lawfulsoftware]

I see that "Send Errors" is an option under Logs Monitoring however the list of logs to monitor does not appear until "Logs Monitoring" is set to true and the setting is saved. The options should appear as soon as "Logs Monitoring" is set to true and before the change is saved.

If there is a send error affecting many emails, an email alert will not be very helpful as it will not be sent. A webhook option is essential.

[freescout-helpdesk]

Feel free to submit pull requests with fixes.

[freescout-helpdesk]

We've made some changes - now if an email could not be sent a support agent will see an error message after 1 hour (while FreeScout will continue attempts to send it).

[lawfulsoftware]

tyvm