*web/email question regarding running in background

[Ken Sproul]

This may be for the PxPlus team.


We have a background process that sends emails using *web/email.
This process is designed to handle any email errors reported by *web/email and continue running.
Recently that background process started hanging.
We discovered that that the email server credentials had changed.
Once we updated the credentials, the process stopped hanging.


So my question is what could be happening inside *web/email to cause the background process to hang instead of simply returning the authentication error?


PxPlus Version: 15.10

[Mike King]

Some Email servers simply don't respond to invalid credentials and let the caller timeout eventually.  They do this to prevent spammers from trying to hack onto your email server by constantly trying invalid credentials. 

For example if you take our email server, if you fail the connection too many times it blocks your IP for about 10 minutes, and if this occurs more more than once or twice it will block your IP for a few days. 

When the IP is blocked the email program will get no response for a connection and thus hang for a while until the connect times out.

[Ken Sproul]

Thanks for the info Mike.


I was wondering if it was doing some kind of UI waiting forever for a user response since we had to kill and restart the process to get it going again.  We did however get an authentication error when we tested sending an email in a foreground process, which is how we figured it out.