Hey allWe have an application which has been running a certain process without error for a year. All of a sudden yesterday morning this process is sporadically failing. As far as we all know (developers and admins), nothing has changed, no code or server settings.
The application allows users to register for training classes. When the user registers, it sends a calendar invitation to their Outlook mailbox. It used to be a Notes mailbox, but we switched to Exchange a little over a year ago. When the user accepts or declines the invitation, that response gets mailed back into the originating application and processed so that the users registration document is updated to reflect their choice.
The server on which the application sits is still R5, so in order to use the iCal functionality, we upgraded our SMTP gateway server to R6.5. The invitation successfully gets converted and arrives in the users outlook. When it’s running properly, the return address (to which the invitation response gets sent) is a mailbox on the gateway (R6.5) server. This is so the response document gets converted to a Notes “Notice” form with all of the appropriate invitation response fields for Notes C&S to understand. A ‘Before Mail Arrives’ agent then sends it on to the originating application on the R5 server. ( I know, it would have been easier to upgrade the original server, but it wasn’t an option).
What started happening yesterday is that most (but not all) of the invitation responses do not get converted. The form remains ‘Memo’ instead of ‘Notice’ and none of the appropriate fields are getting added to the form. In my testing, I registered and accepted or declined invitations and generated about 30 responses. One of those worked, the rest failed. In watching the emails coming through for other people in the company, a few are working and others are failing. The success / failure is not dependant on the person or on the email client used (client / web) I’ve tried both.
We’ve stopped and restarted the router; shut down and rebooted the server with the same results. Again, this has been running this way for a year without issue until yesterday.
Does anyone have any ideas as to the potential cause or location of the issue? I don’t know at what point in the data stream the actual conversion happens, ie before it hits a mail.box, between the mail.box and the destination email file, or once it’s in the email file itself.