Send E-mail smart service breaks with "An error occurred in executing an activity class." However, when I restart the node, it works fine.

ashwing264 over 5 years ago

We have a wrapper process(Process A) which calls another process(Process B) as an MNI. This process B has a send e-mail smart service node. We have observed that this send e-mail smart service node breaks in about 25% of the cases and the alert simply says "An error occurred in executing an activity class."

However, when I go into the process and re-start the broken node without making any changes, then the node works fine. Has anyone else encountered this? What is the solution to avoid it?

Thank you!

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0 Ashvin Kapur over 5 years ago

Hi Ashwin,

Have you checked the logs to see if there's a more descriptive error message? That would be my first debugging step.

On several projects, I've seen a similar issue where there is a limit set on the mail server to start rejecting emails from a particular sender the volume exceeds a certain threshold. This is to protect against malicious email trojans. How many emails are being sent at once (how many loops does the MNI perform)?
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0 SANTOSH S KUNDLIK
A Score Level 2
over 5 years ago

Hi Ashwin,

I am not sure how long the Process B is getting executed, there is possibility that if you are connected to your email server for longer time and sending emails, it might stop your connection. I think you should be able to see an error in Jboss Server.log file. If you find more details in log file, it will be easy to find out cause of problem.
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0 Dastagiri Dudekula over 5 years ago

While i was going through the Send Email smart service i could notice that, NOTE: Email messages that are larger than allowed by your mail server (or service provider) fail without error notification, and do not trigger an activity exception.
docs.appian.com/.../Send_Email_Smart_Service.html
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0 snehab848
Certified Lead Developer
over 5 years ago

Hi Ashwin,
Another thing that you can check is the assignment tab of the Send email smart service. Ideally it should be set to 'Run as whoever designed the Process model'. If it is set to 'Run as whoever started the process' then it might not work because process initiator can be a basic user who might not have rights to initiate the smart service node.

Hope this helps!
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0 harrisont606 over 5 years ago

This is almost definitely a load issue. How many instances are you spawning at once with MNI? I recommend breaking the data into smaller batches, or setting the MNI to spawn one at a time instead of all at once (if you have not already done that). Depending on the results, you may need to set up subprocesses which time out and then restart as a form of retry logic.
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