Is there a way to set up Ignition to send out email alerts from a backup email server in the event that a primary email server is down?
It is not built into Ignition to accomplish this. However, you may be able to accomplish it using the distribution group email profile. That profile allows you to validate alarms against an expression. If you can somehow detect that your primary email server is down you can use one profile for when it is up and a second profile for when it is down. They would have different SMTP servers.
This is a good feature request. I will put a ticket in.
The way we do it here -
I setup a cname alias to our mail server. If my primary server goes down I can make a quick DNS change to the backup server.
Is there any update on this feature request?
We are facing similar issues with GoDaddy email server, we have 5 installations at site and after 15-20 days GoDaddy email server goes to inactive mode and no notifications from Ignition to operators. GoDaddy told us that your sending marketing emails, hence it is happening, hence we purchased marketing pack still we are facing same issue. So, we would like to setup backup email server, if GoDaddy email server failed, we could send email notification via backup server.
We are planning to setup backup email server with postale.io - Easy domain emails
Is there any other solution, please advise.
Are these internal emails? Or to designated clients? If so, run your own mail server and have the recipient companies trust it. Not as your backup mail server, but as your primary mail server.
Unfortunately, we don't have any updates on failover SMTP profiles. I did think of a new way. You can ping your SMTP server in the alarm notification pipeline using a script block:
import os
import platform
param = "-n" if "Windows" in platform.platform() else "-c"
hostname = "MYSMTPSERVER"
response = os.system("ping %s 1 %s" % (param, hostname))
event['smtpAvailable'] = response == 0
You can use a splitter on that variable to choose between two separate email notification profiles with two separate SMTP servers.
@Travis.Cox and @pturmel
Thank you very much!
@Travis.Cox, as your example code we could ping and detect the SMTP server is working or not, however our problem is to detect email id is active or inactive.
We believe that all the GoDaddy users using "smtpout.secureserver.net" SMTP server, which is working all the time.
Could you please advise?
Gotcha. Which email id are you detecting? The email you are trying to send a message to or the email you are sending from?
Hello @Travis.Cox,
We would like to check or detect email ID from which we are sending notification emails to users/operators.
Suppose we are using email ID scada@xxxscada.com, our domain hosted with GoDaddy. So, we would like to scada@xxxscada.com check this email ID is active or inactive. As mentioned above this email id inactivate automatically in 10-15 days and notifications stops. Hence, we are trying to develop fail-over smtp with different service provider. If GoDaddy email id is inactive we will switch to fail-over SMTP that way we could send critical notifications on time.
As we research last 10 -15 days, every service provider has their norms and spam detection. So, Gmail, Yahoo, and O365 also block the email ID we are using for notification.
As per IT team own mail server is not maintainable and cost wise inefficient.
Then you are not using proper email signatures (DKIM) and source authorization (SPF) in your email infrastructure, and that causes big email services to declare your traffic to be spam.
Sounds to me that you need to fire your IT staff.