I posted this as a reply in a similar topic in the general forum but haven't had a reply so thought it more appropriate here ...

Has anybody else had this?

On my installation (1.9.6.1 - asp.net 4.0) some people who have subscribed get the notifications and others do not (although they have in the past). I can see no difference at all in their notification/subscription preferences etc. Its roughly half receiving and half not (out of around 40).

The 'yaf_WatchForum' table is showing a 'LastMail' date/time for everyone as if they've all had the lastest notification, even though some of them have not.

The email addesses for these people are definately correct and the messages are not in their junk mail folder. I have checked at the company firewall outer boundary and they never made it that far (whereas all the other spam was there to see!). It is a staff intranet with membership only through Active Directory and everybody using Microsft Outlook for their mail with the same domain (our company domain) for their email addresses (although the email domain used by YAF and the whole Intranet to send mail is a different domain hosted externally). In short I believe I've ruled out any problems that could have occurred after being successfully sent from Yaf - therefore I don't think they were actually sent. Sending mail manually in another part of the Intranet that uses the same mail.config settings works fine.

Has anybody else had this 'unreliability'? I suspect it may have gone unnoticed because people might never know that they are not receiving emails they haven't had, so no way of discovering the bug.

Can anybody give me any hints for how to debug such an issue?

If it helps, my mail.config setting are...

obviously I've replaced actual with 'MYDOMAIN' and 'MYPASSWORD' here. Could my mail.config settings be approached more effectively?

Please help - at the moment I am being accused of discrimination amongst the staff!

I have a fairly small user base (20 some odd people) and we haven't had any issues with missing email notifications, I suppose it could be a load issue if your getting a lot of posts, but with the size and activity we have that wouldn't be an issue for us. All users on our board, are however, set to receieve for all boards/posts, whereas perhaps yours are not. I don't see anything that stands out with your mail.conf, but there are more experienced folk who might catch something. Good luck in tracking down your problem.

Thanks Thantis

No its definately not a load issue - at the moment about one post a week with about 40 subscribers max.

I would like to be able to pinpoint where the error is happening, because its a possibility that YAF is doing it's work perfectly and my mail provider (aspnethosting.co.uk) is dropping the ball. Can anybody suggest a way to debug the sending of notifications part of YAF if I'm using the compiled version? Can I be sure that no email related exceptions are being thrown without me knowing (eg - a catch block with no action)?

I think I recall one of the dev's saying there is a function to track mail debugging in the logs, but the code isn't compiled with the feature on. I will give the forum a look to see where that thread is when I have a bit more time when I am not at work, but if you use the search feature you might find it yourself.