Email approval failed with state error

[JJack]

Hi,
I have a process with a failure at an external authorisation node, 'Email approval failed with state error'. 
It happened yesterday.
If I find the email in the folder, it shows a green envelope with status Delivery - Delivered, and the associated 'message delivery status' log has:
05/03/2024 16:15:49    Failed to deliver message to target recipient. …
05/03/2024 16:15:49    Delivery will be re-attempted at 2024-03-05 16:16:49Z (1 minutes), attempt 1/9…
05/03/2024 16:16:52    Message delivered to target recipient OK

I'm told in the failed process log to 'see delivery log for message 26725'; 
(
0.170564s    INFO    External Approval State: error
0.170580s    ERROR    External Approval Error Message: ERROR: Unable to deliver message, see delivery log for message 26725
)
is this the log I can see as above or is there something different?  If so, where can I find this 'delivery log'?

What I can see doesn't seem to have any obvious 'message' number of 26725. I can't either see anything like a 'message number' in the various mail log files (Platform configuration/monitor/Log files).

How can I know if the failure was caused by sending out the authorisation request or by an attempt to approve (or reject) the call? 
As there is a line just before the failure message, in the block timed at 05/03/2024 16:15:49 as: 
0.154592s    INFO    Execution reason is 'erResumeEmailApproval'
I'm guessing the latter.
However, 05/03/2024 16:15:49 is before the message that the email had been delivered, showing as 05/03/2024 16:16:52

The email asking for approval seems to have been sent around 05/03/2024 16:15:10 and the error in the process occurred around 05/03/2024 16:15:49.

The documentation Log Files (hornbill.com) tells me:
EspMailService.log
View this log to monitor events related to your mailboxes and the processing of incoming and outgoing emails
(It doesn't mention the EmailDirectOutboundMailRouter.log).
Neither of these logs go back to yesterday.
For one kind of log file I noticed a message like ' Previous log file(s) archived to EspInstance….zip '
Is this the case for all the older log files I can't see, and do I have access to them?
Sorry for such a rambling post, not sure what is relevant and wouldn't mind extra information on the archived log files too.
 

[Gerry]

@JJack

Thanks for your post.  Your question is fair, and the answer is, at the moment, without peeking under the hood in the database, locating the mentioned delivery log is difficult.  Basiclaly, if you can find the message in the Direct Outbount Mail view in the platform admin, the recipient for that message will have a red envelope next to it, and clicking that would open the detail of the message delivery log.   The Direct Outbound Mail view though does not make it possible, given a message Id to easily locate the message which is a bit rubbish I am afraid. 

So....

- If you log a support request with our team, they can get someone to peer into the database and locate the message/delivery log in question
- In the mean time I will ask someone in the platform dev team to look at/rethink that (not very useful) Direct Outbound Message view and improve it to make diagnosing mail send failures like this much easier. 

Gerry

[Gerry]

@JJack

We have added this item to the platform roadmap, and its made it directly into the work in progress queue, so I would expect this to be generally available in the next couple of weeks.   Once this is in, we will aim to extend the BPM logging such that the message ID its self will be clickable, and that will take you directly to the offering/failed message, all to make issues like this simpler for you to diagnose and rectify.  Look out for this in an update soon. 

Gerry

[JJack]

@Gerry 
Sounds excellent, thank you.
Good to have links from the the process logs too.

This particular call, I just did a save and restart in the failed process and it carried on happily.

Is it possible the process did not (or could not) wait for, or coordinate itself with, the re-delivery attempts of the email.

If anyone does know about access to archived log files, I'd be glad to hear ('Previous log file(s) archived to EspInstance….zip')

Thanks,
Jill.

[Gerry]

@JJack

Quote

Is it possible the process did not (or could not) wait for, or coordinate itself with, the re-delivery attempts of the email.

I would not have thought so, when the message is sent, its queued and the normal mail delivery semantics, including retries for non-hard errors are applied. If the delivery attempt gets a hard rejection, for example, address not known at this server, then thats considered a hard error and the message is rejected, in this case our server will mark the devery attempt as failed and will no longer retry delivery.  This looks like what happened in your case, it looks like a hard delivery failure, but I cannot be sure without seeing the message delivery log for the failed recipient. 

Mail delivery logs are actually stored in the database, and in this case would be stored against the message recipient record, so I imagine the log is there, its just not easy for you to see without delving into the raw database - which is not a very customer-friendly thing to have to do - hence the suggestion if you log a call, one of our techs can get that out of the database for you.  Once the changes are added to the product you will be able to go and see this yourself without our assistance. 

Gerry

[Gerry]

This has been implemented and will be in a platform release in the next week or so.   

The Direct Outbound Email View has been reimplemented. The basic premise of this change was in recognition that the management view provided previously was not very useful. While it was "Outlook" like, and allowed you to browse the emails that has been sent, it was less than functional when it comes to administrators needing to track down problems. For example, in a Workflow log, it would report that the authoriser email failed to send, providing you with a message ID. The problem is, when you went to the Direct Outbound view there was no way of entering in a message id, no way of searching for a recipient email address, or email body for things like a Workflow ID etc.... Further more, the direct outbound view did not give you any way of easily seeing if one or messages had failed delivery, and generally no way to search for deliver status and so on. This leads to customers needing to either a) poke around in the underlying database, or b) call us, to raise a support request and have us ( being support ) to poke around in the underlying database. These changes are designed to make sure that customers can more readily help themselves, making the Direct Outbound Message view a *useful* administration tool.

The following changes have been made...

• The view is now a tabular view, rather than a "try to look like outlook email" view
• Have added the ability to search/filter by all the useful criteria, including message ID, recipient, sender, and advanced search for subject, and of course filter by delivery status to just see the emails, for example, that have failed delivery.
• The email preview opens up the exact email sent so you can see its content
• The email preview shows you the red/green icon next to each recipient so you can see the delivery status of the message, as well as retry the delivery attempts if you want to.