Reporting Services: Email sending error

  • Hi all,

    I'm new to this site, so let me just quickly introduce myself. My name's Jonathan and I'm from Cape Town, South Africa. I'm a Senior Data Specialist for the company I work for.

    Now, to my problem. We have a Project that we've created. Basically, it downloads data from our retailer clients off an ftp site, uploads that data into a database, refreshes a cube and then notifies the Team Leader that the new data is available for use. This all works great - no problem.

    The Team Leader must then run a few reports each month which are emailed off to different Regional Managers. This is where the problem comes in. The reports were created in Visual Studio 2005 Reporting Services and deployed onto a server. The Team Leader accesses them through the Reporting Services front-end. She then creates subscriptions so the reports can run and automatically email the reports to the Regional Managers when they are completed.

    Unfortunately, is seems the email functionality isn't working correctly. It will send emails to anyone within our organisation but as soon as you enter an external email address the email simply does not reach its destination. No error is given by reporting services - the email simply is never sent. In fact, the whole subscription completes without a result. Basically what happens is that the report does run but is simply never emailed. If we run the report manually on the front-end, it works 100%. If we subscribe and email the report to someone within our organisation (i.e. within our email domain), it works 100%. But if we subscribe and email someone outside of our domain, it simply doesn't send the email. Even if we include 2 email address - 1 from within our domain and 1 outside our domain - it still doesn't send out any emails to either of them.

    I'm almost sure it's something to do with our Firewall, but the Techs who look after our network say the server has rights and they are not receiving any errors from it's logs about the email service.

    Can anyone think of what's going wrong? I'm seriously at a loss. Could it be something to do with External access? Perhaps the emails are being sent but aren't being received (although we've tried numerous email addresses to test this). The fact that it does email within our domain means that the email service is setup correctly, so I'm at a loss as to explain this...

  • Could it be that email-relay to external addresses (outside the domain) is prohibited on the emailserver, and that the email therefore is not sent ?

    Peter Rijs
    BI Consultant, The Netherlands

  • Thanks Peter for the reply - I'll have a look and check the server. I'll post the answer to your question shortly.

  • Have you had any luck with this since you posted? I am running into the same wall. The subscription sends emails within the domain just fine, but as soon as I add an external address it fails and no one receives any message.

  • Hi Samsonjr.

    The work I did was for an outside company - just a bit of consultancy work. Basically, I've checked every SQL setting on the server and compared it to other servers where the emails are going out - all settings are identical. It seems like it's a firewall issue - that the server simply does not have permission to send emails to anything other than local domain emails (anything outside of the local domain fails instantly - it doesn't even attempt to send the email). Of course I know the email settings are fine because it is sending mail inside the domain.

    The company was supposed to schedule a meeting with their IT infrastructure technician, but they've been doing what alot of big companies do - procrastinating. I've told them what I think the problem is and they just haven't checked anything yet. I'm basically waiting for them to get all the relevant people in one room for a sitdown meeting.

    I'll post an update as soon as I have one. But in the meantime, I'd recommend checking your server's settings - make sure that there isn't a firewall or company email policy that is preventing it from sending emails to outside domains.

  • Also check the ip address on the reporting server configuration. The rules on the email server might need a private ip address and not the public.

  • It turned out to be an email relay authorization of the server. Once the server's ip address was authorized for email relay in the Exchange Hub Transport all subscriptions were able to be sent outside of the organization.I posted some information about here http://ayesamson.com/2010/09/17/delivering-subscriptions-outside-of-the-ogranization/

  • I think this has also been our problem. In the meantime, I need to recover the file that was supposed to have been e-mailed out. Is there somewhere this file can be retrieved from? THANK YOU!

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