Nintex outgoing email settings on IIS 7.0

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Nintex outgoing email settings on IIS 7.0

As you've probably noticed by now I'm working with Nintex at the moment.

Yesterday I was trying to create a workflow that had to send a notification to a user. I added my smtp server and a from address to the Nintex outgoing email settings. Be aware that you have to set the Nintex outgoing email settings separately from the outgoing email settings for the rest of your farm. This is because Nintex uses System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient.Send where as SharePoint itself uses SPUtility.SendEmail (thanks Gerard!). So Nintex doesn't take over the farm settings for outgoing email and theoratically you could use a different smtp server or from address for Nintex workflow. Now that I write it down I realise that this last fact might be the reason why they use different settings. To give you the opportunity to define a specific from address for emails send from workflows.

Anyway, even after I added my smtp server and from address to both my SharePoint farm and Nintex settings page I still received errors that emails could not be send as no from address was specified. I didn't understand why that would happen so I opened up Bing (I really like Bing, and I love the background pictures) to try and find other people with the same problem and preferably a solution too. I didn't find anyone with the same problem, nor did I find a clear solution, but I did find someone that was having problems with other Nintex related settings that he traced down to being caused by using IIS 7.0 (and Windows Server 2008) as opposed to using IIS 6.0. As it happens I'm using Windows Server 2008 with IIS 7.0 as well. So I decided to have a closer look at IIS 7.0 and also fill in my smtp server in the IIS 7.0 settings.

This did the trick. My emails are being send without a problem now. I didn't investigate any further as to what is causing this somewhat weird behaviour. It might have something to do with the firewall. I might do a bit more investigating later on, but as others may have the same problem I decided to at least post the solution I found now…

Hope this can help others.

Print | posted @ Friday, June 12, 2009 8:42 PM

Comments on this entry:

# re: Nintex outgoing email settings on IIS 7.0

by alberto at 6/25/2009 8:53 AM

Hello Mirjam,
Gees, this sounds too similar to our problem that I’m working on. I work for military government and administer our enterprise SharePoint portal. Not long ago, one of our sub-sites workflows quit working sending emails to users. To add to the problem, emails worked sporadically, in other words, users would get their first email notification but any follow-on emails would not be received. After several days of troubleshooting with our Exchange 2003 administrator we came to the conclusion that Exchange 2003 or our firewall was at fault. We found several hundredths of email being queued up in the Exchange queue and not be delivered but when looking at Exchange system logs. The system logs stated that in deed the emails were being delivered. Boy, by this time, we both, our Exchange/SharePoint team was really dumbfounded as why this was going on. The moral of the story is that we are now at a stand-still and are waiting to install SharePoint SP2 to see if this clears our problem. I would surely be interested in your investigating efforts….