We send a lot of emails, mostly event notification and some error notification. Never had a problem.
Most of our emails are actually faxes – we use RightFax, and Rightfax has an email interface, where one of our emails is converted to a fax message. This allows us to create an html email that looks nice, and then that image gets faxed out. We send out 200-300 emails a day, mostly these faxes.
We use tcl, using the smtp and mime tcl packages. It took a little trial and error but everything is working, including sending emails with attachments. We have dedicated outbound threads that send emails. They expect a message with a vrl format that has email header components as the vrl fields – To, CC, BCC, Subject, Body, Filename (for attachments), etc. Several of the processing attributes are stored in Cloverleaf tables (like Environment Name), to make the tcl procs generic, and runnable without change in Test or Prod.
We have one version where a filename is passed, and it is added to the email header as an attachment, and another version where the message itself becomes the attachment, and the email body is a small, standard text value.
You may want to work with your infrastructure team to agree on a standard value for your email Sender name, as well as to make sure your Cloverleaf server’s email service is running and forwarding emails to your corporate email server. We do have Microsoft Exchange and we have our own mailbox, but that is mainly for receiving automatic replies (we don’t do incoming emails, only outgoing. There is a Cloverleaf add-on component to provide email inbound processing).
The emails are single threaded and if there are attachments, could take several seconds to complete the email creation and sending. We just recently added an interface that includes an RTF file as an attachment, and this file contains a graphic image/logo, which added about two minutes for each email to be processed. Other than that, no issues.
One caveat – we run on AIX v7.1, Cloverleaf 6.2.0.2, and we have HACMP implemented, and several times, after a failover, controlled or unexpected, the email service was not automatically started. This is more of a server or HACMP issue than a Cloverleaf email issue, but just wanted to point it out.
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