Dear Benjamin,

please make sure that you are a member of the project you want to receive notifications for. If you're not a member, mentioning you will not lead to an email being sent out.

Kind regards

Good morning Matthias!  Thank you for taking the time to respond.

I and my co-worker are indeed both members of the project, and were when we were testing the feature.  Does it matter what level at which you are a member (i.e. reader, member, admin, etc.) ? We are both admins within the OpenProject instance, given that we are part of the team evaluating OpenProject for our group.

Given it is an on-premises instance of OpenProject, and that I also struggled a bit to get the normal email notifications working - is there something in the installation process I may have missed?

I am by no means a Linux server guru - our IT got it set up, so I would be stumbling in the dark a bit; but if you had helpful info that I could relay to them, that'd be much appreciated!

Thanks,

~Benjamin

Hi Benjamin,

if the regular work package update emails work (change an attribute and see if there's an email) and if sending a test email works then email should not be the problem, I guess. Have you looked in your spam folder, too?

As long as you're in the project members list you should be fine. However, given that emails work, could you try to ltest this with a non-admin user, too?

And please make sure your notification settings are not turned off: 

Kind regards

Hello Matthias,

Well after double-checking, I seem to be in an odd spot - I know the notification emails (for work package updates) was working earlier.  But right now, it appears that only the invite/test emails are coming through.

With all the settings mentioned above, and the membership you noted, no work package related emails are coming through.

Any further thoughts in that case?

Thank you! ~Benjamin

Hello Benjamin,

please refer to this post for more information regarding emails.

Kind regards

Ah, thank you for that Matthias - I didn't realize there were two aspects to the email (such that tests could still send while the others weren't functioning)

The health check gave me this:

full
  database: PASSED Schema version: 20210219092709 (0.002s)
  default: PASSED Application is running (0.000s)
  delayed_jobs_backed_up: PASSED Delayed Jobs with priority lower than '0' at reasonable level (0) (0.002s) (OPTIONAL)
  delayed_jobs_never_ran: PASSED All previous jobs have completed within the past 5 minutes. (0.001s)
  mail: FAILED ActionMailer::Base at localhost:25 is not accepting connections: 'localhost is not accepting connections on port 25: Connection refused - connect(2) for "localhost" port 25' (0.001s)
  puma: PASSED N/A as Puma is not used. (0.056s) (OPTIONAL)

So it would indeed appear that something is amiss with the mail given the "mail: FAILED" entry.

Running the command you mentioned:

ps aux | grep jobs

I do indeed get a "jobs:work" entry - but I went ahead to restart the worker just to see if it would help, and also tried scaling the worker to 1.  It said "Nothing to do." So I am assuming both aspects indicate the worker is running, and scaled correctly.

When going to restart the server I saw this:

9 updates can be installed immediately.
0 of these updates are security updates.
To see these additional updates run: apt list -- upgradeable

And noted while installing:

80% [9 openproject 87.9 MB/149 MB 59%]

Which leads me to believe there were some updates needed for OpenProject itself?  We'll see what happens when it all comes back online here in a second ...

...and no dice.  Still get the same "mail: FAILED" in the health checks.  I am going to follow up with our security admin right now to see if they have thoughts as to why port 25 is causing issues like that, and I'll let you know what I find!

Thanks,

~Benjamin

Okay, well I feel very sheepish!  :)

Turned out to be a very simple fix.  Though I still don't know what the story is with the port 25 error mentioned before.

So ... early on we were worried about people feeling "spammed" by the notifications; so I had turned them off at the admin level:

Which I 1) forgot I had done, and 2) didn't realize would override the individual user settings; for some reason I had previously interpreted it as "default" settings, but the user could opt-in for any of them at any time.

So I had gotten myself stuck in a circle looking through settings (thinking I had already looked everywhere), without actually realizing what I was looking at for the admin settings.  If there was a facepalm emoji here, I'd use it!

Thank you for the help Matthias - glad it was a simple solution, but am sorry I took your time circling back to a basic setting!  It is all working correctly.

I may have to ask a separate question in the future regarding modifying the body of the email (or included info) - if I can't find anything on it here in the forum.

Thanks ~ Benjamin

Hello Benjamin,

I'm glad you were able to solve this!

Regarding the setting in the administration: I just tried this for an existing user: When I changed the default notification settings in the administration the user's settings were not overwritten. Did you see a different behavior?

Regarding the body of the email: It can't be changed (at least not in the UI) at the moment. Here's an epic (feature request) regarding this topic with several related work packages detailing the request. Please feel free to add comments (thoughts or "+1") for the features you'd be interested in.

Kind regards

Hello Matthias,

The default notification drop down in the admin setting (for new users) does not override the current settings any individual user has set.  But in my testing, the admin check boxes for Actions When Notification Emails Should Be Sent does indeed turn on/off emails for those specific scenarios across all users.

Is that not the correct behavior?

____________________________________

Unfortunately, we have been finding (in our prototyping) that OpenProject is not yet robust enough in key areas that we need:

• Resource Management - along the lines of what looks to be possible with Meister Plan
• Slippage Tracking / Baseline - as apparently is possible in MS Project
• Intuitive Budgeting across projects with more flexibility assigning dollar values/usage without having to double up on hour by hour time entry with our ERP System
• More infrequent, flexible, meaningful, customizable notification options (this thread helped me understand the limitations better!)
• (I am still working on our evaluation list, so there may be others too)

I know there are certain features/requests under discussion along these lines; but the need for the features is current and I have seen some of those features sitting for 6+ years (which I understand, it is open source and all that).

Pricing-wise, we may be back to reevaluate OpenProject when those key features have been implemented and matured!

Thanks again for your help, and for the great work!  It is definitely a very powerful tool for the price and has been helpful for us to hone in on what we need.

~Benjamin

Hello Benjamin,

Thanks for the response!
You're right: This check boxes will change the behavior for all users. Sorry for my misunderstanding!

And thank you for the feedback! Yes, we're not where we want to be, yet, but made some good progress over the past years. I think the main limiting factor is developing capacity at the moment, which is rather due to being a small company than due to being Open Source, in my opinion.

Nevertheless: Good luck for finding the right tool!

Kind regards