Process model created by Basic User does not send email

Hi Stefano,

Can you shed some light on how you have the Send Email Smart Service configured? It would be good if you could provide a screenshot.

Just some quick question to help the troubleshooting:

• Is the node completed with success in your process instance with the Basic User?
• Are you sure that email is not being sent? Please check the following documentation (https://docs.appian.com/suite/help/20.3/Configuring_Custom_Email_Senders.html) so you can clearly validate if your email client is blocking possible email spoofing by some reason.

Hello Pedro Simões,

thank you for the response.

To answer your questions:

• The smart service just sends an email from the process model to an application group.
• The node is always completed with success, regardless of who started the process.
• I believe I isolated a minimal example, excluding other causes. I have a replica of the above process model created by a System Administrator, and it works (even when the Basic User is starting it). Therefore, I am fairly sure that the email is not being sent, and that the only variable influencing it is the process model creator. This behavior is unexpected. Besides setting Run as whoever started the process on the smart service, I even tried making the target group Public and with Low privacy; still it does not work.

Yeah I'm a little surprised that the node is completing successfully but isn't sending an error. One question - do you see anything inside of the stdout log? That log is a catch all for all kinds of errrors, so you might see something there.

Also, it seems like your issue may be related to something else, but I'd still recommend having every node (except for User Input Tasks) to use "Run as whoever designed this process model". There's basically no downside to doing this, and it can prevent security issues in automated activities.

Peter Lewis stdout was empty.

Also, I tried the setting you suggested ("Run as whoever designed this process model"), although I think that it should not make a difference with my configuration.

Too "bad", by the time I was able to isolate this setting in tests, the issue had seemingly spontaneously resolved (see my answer).

After a few days, it appears that the issue is gone, now even the process models designed by the Basic User can send email.
I have been able to replicate the bug several times, and now with the same settings I can't reproduce it anymore.

I have absolutely no idea of what caused the issue, I'll just leave some random observations for future reference, in case this happens to anyone in the future and they find this discussion:

1) As previously stated (see other answers), it is unlikely that the problem is due to the mail server on the receiver side. As the email is sent from the "Process Model", it shouldn't contain any information about the process model creator.

2) Before the problem disappeared, we did try the following actions:
- Having a System Adminstrator duplicate the process model created by the basic user to check if it would send email (it did)
- Change the setting suggested by Peter Lewis in his answer ("Run as whoever designed this process model")

I cannot correlate these actions with the solution.

Thanks for all the help!