Some Email Notifications Not Working (Email Notification Agent)

[Southerncentralrain]

I have noticed over the last couple of days that some of my emails that are sent with the Email Notification Agent are not being sent. It appears to be ones that have a lot of variables in them (or possibly a lot of text). These same emails have sent without issue for months. I am still seeing regular emails that are simple with minimal text and variables. I have checked spam folders etc. and they are not available (even tried sending to different email accounts with no success).

Have any of you guys experienced anything similar? Any ideas or advice would be appreciated.

[South Africa C4 user]

I have the same problem.  Started in the last 48 hours.  Very frustrating!

Edited February 26, 2022 by South Africa C4 user

[South Africa C4 user]

I tried deleting stuff from my biggest email (and had to delete 75% of my variables (any 75%) to get my problem email working.

[Southerncentralrain]

Thanks for the information - glad it isn't just me. I just ran a few tests and found out that it isn't the variables. It appears to be simply the size of the body. If it hits a certain threshold, it just doesn't send. 

I have been converting some of the notifications over to @alanchow's email notifications but that takes a bit of manipulation because of the way the variables are called. Hopefully they will address this soon as I have a lot of important logging information and alerts that I send via email.

[South Africa C4 user]

26 minutes ago, Southerncentralrain said:

Thanks for the information - glad it isn't just me. I just ran a few tests and found out that it isn't the variables. It appears to be simply the size of the body. If it hits a certain threshold, it just doesn't send. 

I have been converting some of the notifications over to @alanchow's email notifications but that takes a bit of manipulation because of the way the variables are called. Hopefully they will address this soon as I have a lot of important logging information and alerts that I send via email.

Thanks! Good to know that the issue is total size of the email.  I have reported the issue to our country rep.  Hopefully C4 fixes fixes soon!

 

@Darin, C4 PM UI 

[eggzlot]

A few days ago I was reorganizing my two wine fridges and I have sensors on them to let me know when opened/closed and neither sent me notifications - using the built in C4 Email Notification agent (though I flip them to text messages to my cell)

Started working again yesterday without me making any changes so go figure

[South Africa C4 user]

@ChrisHenderson - there is definitely a problem where larger emails are not being sent.  This problem has been impacting both of my houses for the last week.  I have made absolutely no changes at the 1 house so am pretty to sure this is an external problem.  In fairness, my problem emails are long (about 4 pages when printed out with lots of variables).  If I cut the email by 75% (I.e. drop it to 1 page in length) it works perfectly no matter what I drop.  Note: the sizing comments are very very approximate as I have not done any scientific tests.

[South Africa C4 user]

@Southerncentralrain - I still have this problem with large emails not working (since late Feb).  Are you still experiencing this problem or have you switched over to another method of sending emails.  I have refrained from changing over as I have been convinced that C4 will fix this as it is their email agent.  But so far, long emails are simply not working at both my residences.  Very annoying as I send a daily dump of data to myself from whichever house I am not in and this has not been working for 3 months and as I am never in both houses at once, this is (at least) 1 email a day that simply does not come through!  I also send monthly updates from both houses which I have just (as I typed this) realised that I have also not been getting (clearly over this new size limit).  Hopefully someone from C4 is looking at this!

[Southerncentralrain]

@South Africa C4 userI have switched most of the large emails over to @alanchow's notifications driver method and keep the C4 emails short. It definitely sucks to have to redo the big emails with all of the variables but, luckily, I didn't have that many. Some of my emails I just shortened so I didn't have to redo them. Good luck. 

[South Africa C4 user]

8 minutes ago, Southerncentralrain said:

@South Africa C4 userI have switched most of the large emails over to @alanchow's notifications driver method and keep the C4 emails short. It definitely sucks to have to redo the big emails with all of the variables but, luckily, I didn't have that many. Some of my emails I just shortened so I didn't have to redo them. Good luck. 

Thanks… very depressing.  I will give it another month and cross fingers that C4 fix the native email agent! If not then I know what I will be doing during my July leave!

[South Africa C4 user]

@Skipper J - maybe you can look into this issue also,  in essence lengthy emails have not been sending from numerous (probably all) projects since late February. By way of example, some of us use the email agent to send 4 or 5 page emails with system information in them on a regular basis.  These no longer work.

[Skipper J]

19 hours ago, South Africa C4 user said:

@Skipper J - maybe you can look into this issue also,  in essence lengthy emails have not been sending from numerous (probably all) projects since late February. By way of example, some of us use the email agent to send 4 or 5 page emails with system information in them on a regular basis.  These no longer work.

I'm not too familiar with the email agent, but I can get a bug logged with the right folks. In the meantime, which version of Director are you running?

[South Africa C4 user]

1 hour ago, Skipper J said:

I'm not too familiar with the email agent, but I can get a bug logged with the right folks. In the meantime, which version of Director are you running?

I would appreciate it if you can log the bug.

Director: CA10 running OS 3.2.4 build 615802-res

[Skipper J]

Done. If I receive an update, I'll post up here.

[Skipper J]

@South Africa C4 user - Quick update for you - there was a new limit implemented of 914 characters a while back. (There's also a timestamp that is appended that pushes things up to a total of 1,000 characters, which is where the 914 value comes from.)

The bug is still open, so the limit may be removed, but I don't have a timeline for that. However, I wanted to share the limit so that you could at least have a target to aim for to get some emails going back out.

[South Africa C4 user]

6 hours ago, Skipper J said:

@South Africa C4 user - Quick update for you - there was a new limit implemented of 914 characters a while back. (There's also a timestamp that is appended that pushes things up to a total of 1,000 characters, which is where the 914 value comes from.)

The bug is still open, so the limit may be removed, but I don't have a timeline for that. However, I wanted to share the limit so that you could at least have a target to aim for to get some emails going back out.

Thanks for the feedback… I certainly hope they remove the limit  (or at least increase it to something more sensible for an email).

Thanks again!

[Skipper J]

@South Africa C4 user - One more update - the limit has been increased to 1,000,000 characters. Not that you necessarily want to send an email that big, but it's at least a little bit more than 914.  I can't give an exact date for the rollout of the new limit, but it's on the way.

[South Africa C4 user]

14 hours ago, Skipper J said:

@South Africa C4 user - One more update - the limit has been increased to 1,000,000 characters. Not that you necessarily want to send an email that big, but it's at least a little bit more than 914.  I can't give an exact date for the rollout of the new limit, but it's on the way.

Thanks! My emails are back working… really appreciate it.  I doubt that I will get to a million characters soon

[R_Willis]

I know this is an older thread.

I have used the native email notification agent for years. I have it sent to my phones (email address) so it arrives as a txt. It has worked faultless for years.

Recently it started acting up. The messages still go thru, sometimes immediately and other times delayed by 20min, 3hrs, or whatever. It logs the correct event time. 

No changes in my system. Same router, modem, etc. Director is on 3.1.3. 

Have rebooted EA5.

Phone service was Sprint, now TMobile(bought out Sprint). I have tried sending to 000-000-0000@sprint.messagingpsc.com and 000-000-0000@tmomail.com

Any ideas?

[msgreenf]

The controller needs to be re-registered. Once we registered and rebooted emails will work again

[South Africa C4 user]

Also a little off topic but seeing this thread again reminded me of something.

@Skipper J sorted my problem with long emails not coming through.  I am hoping you may also be able to help with this.

Until (about) 2 years ago, one could send very large push notifications to iOS devices (I haven’t used android in years so I don’t know if the same applies).  This was great as I would send a lot of information in one particular push notification and read it on my iPad.  around 2 years ago, push notifications started to be truncated to a much smaller amount of text.  I am not sure if this is an iOS limitation or a C4 limitation.  If C4, I wonder of the limit can be increased like the email character count limit was increased?

[Skipper J]

2 hours ago, South Africa C4 user said:

Also a little off topic but seeing this thread again reminded me of something.

@Skipper J sorted my problem with long emails not coming through.  I am hoping you may also be able to help with this.

Until (about) 2 years ago, one could send very large push notifications to iOS devices (I haven’t used android in years so I don’t know if the same applies).  This was great as I would send a lot of information in one particular push notification and read it on my iPad.  around 2 years ago, push notifications started to be truncated to a much smaller amount of text.  I am not sure if this is an iOS limitation or a C4 limitation.  If C4, I wonder of the limit can be increased like the email character count limit was increased?

I'm not sure about the size limits on the C4 side, I'd have to ask around. However, on the Apple/iOS side, there's a limit of 4KB for standard push notifications, and 5KB for VoIP pushes. (VoIP pushes are used for intercom calls only, btw.)

[South Africa C4 user]

48 minutes ago, Skipper J said:

I'm not sure about the size limits on the C4 side, I'd have to ask around. However, on the Apple/iOS side, there's a limit of 4KB for standard push notifications, and 5KB for VoIP pushes. (VoIP pushes are used for intercom calls only, btw.)

Thanks for this.  4kb means 4,100 characters (I think) which is way more than the current C4 limit (which is about 250 characters).  If this can be increased (back) to 4,000 that would be incredible. A couple of years ago, it must have been around the 4,000 mark.

[Skipper J]

The 4KB limit is for the entire payload of the push. There's additional information being included in addition to the message content that will chew up some of the data available. Not quite 4KB, but there's some extra data in there the app uses. I haven't found any info about current caps, or if they can be increased. (I can't really make any promises about if/when that would increase either.) I'll see what I can do.