Q: Group emails not forwarded to members

Good morning sweh,

     Actually the alias is not added to the group. The alias is added to the user accounts.

     So in your example if you have a user named John Doe with an email of jdoe@genelabs.com you will need to add a second email name next to his jdoe@genelabs.com with jdoe@genelabs-server.genelabs.com. You do not need the alias to the group but to the individual users. You also will need to make sure that the server recognizes email addressed to genelabs-server.genelabs.com as email destined to itself. This is a general email setting.

     One word of caution if you start manually adding these secondary email account to accounts, the mail will start processing the groups. If one member of the group can be delivered the mail message will flow and go to the users who have aliases that work. If you have a large Que. of backed up email you may want to stop email while making changes to the accounts. I am guessing somebody can come up with some script-fu to make the mass change to large numbers of users accounts fast.

     You may also want to be careful as to not have in your example hello@genelabs-server.genelabs.com setup as a group alias or you will create an email loop. This may be why apple group server is delivering to the user@servername.domin.com instead of just user@domain.com it reduces the chances of the a mail loop if the group. The problem is the docs do not talk about this requirement, or why. The other part of the issue is that with server 4 the email is tracking by fully qualified email addresses versus what used to happen when jdoe was good enough to be recognized as jdoe@genelabs.com and jdoe@genelabs-server.genelabs.com now you have to be explicit in your expectations.

I would expect that the only way to know why is to look at the user record in dscl, and open one of the stuck emails in a text editor to see what in the mapping is causing confusion. It may be that during migration some email accounts were upgraded transparently with the full domain name and the domain name where some did not. I am not sure if new accounts may automatically get this special treatment when created. I have also seen that many of my migrated email accounts have a blank line in their email lists. I am not sure why that is there, but I had removed if in the user account.

     I can see from a programmers standpoint why they would choose to do that. It reduces the likelihood of creating a group that includes itself. Or though group memberships ends up including itself and creating an email multiplication loop. Since groups can be members of groups you could accidentally end up creating a circular group. If you make the email deliver to only accounts with a user@servername.domain.com you can allow for the inheritance of the groups while preventing the email from ending up in a loop. As groups typically do not have groupname@servername.domain.com in their email aliases. Child groups of the parent groups would not get the email sent to the group. Just immediate members of the group would get that email. As an experiment somebody could do a test and create a parentgroup@domain.com with a childgroup being a member and the childgroup having the email of childgroup@servername.domain.com you would find that emails going to parentgroup would also go to members of childgroup. But if childgroup did not have an alias of servername.comain.com then members of childgroup would not get the email sent to parentgroup.

     Hopefully I have not thoroughly confused the people.

     Really what apple need to do is automatically have user@domain.com and user@servename.domain.com automatically created when a new user is added. And fix the email accounts when migration is done. Finally with some documentation about what and why one needs to do this. Maybe they will discuss this in the upcoming Peachpit book.

Thanks Eric and Miggl for your help. Unfortunately all your tips did not help. But I took the time to setup all my mail stuff from scratch (it was not so much) and now everything seems to work fine.

Maybe something broke during the update from Mavericks to Yosemite or Server 3 to 4.

Spoke too soon - it has stopped working again....

What did you do to recreate the accounts - delete and re-add?

I think there may be two issues - when I added server.domain to the domains the server will deliver mail for the groups started to work again. After a while, three of the groups had stuck msgs and I had to remove them and restart before the messages would flow again.

Good morning,

     My next suggestion to try would be to capture one of the stuck emails and open it up in a text editor. I use BBedit though text-wrangler may also work. Once you have the email open you can look at the headers in the stuck message and see where the email system is trying to route the message. From there you can try to fix the issue with the reason the email routing is not working right. I would not reccoemnd posting the message here but if you want I can take a look and send you suggestions from whats in the email.

I discovered why at least some of the emails are getting stuck in the List Server queue - I have virtual domains and I used to have them set up so the domains were all the same i.e. mail to xxx@domain1 and mail@domain2 would be delivered to xxx@domain1.

Looks like during the upgrade - this has changed at least partially so now when we set up a group such as info@domain1 and then someone emails info@domain2 - the server accepts the email but the list server doesn't know where to deliver it and the queue gets stuck. If you add an alias to  the user xxx of info@domain2 - the mails get delivered and everything works again.

So basically it looks like a configuration problem caused by the upgrade - I have not found out how to configure it properly yet but I have been able to keep the mail flowing in my case.

d

Oh OK that one is likely not too hard. But still may be a bit of a pain.

Users will need to have full domains. So if John Doe username jdoe is supposed to get email from info@domain1, and info@domain2 they will need to have an email alias for both jdoe@domain1, jdoe@domain2, jdoe@servername.domain1, and jdoe@servername.domain2. Very verbose but should fix the issue your seeing. This will setup an appearance in both domains to allow for the user to be found when the email is being routed to the users.

I am betting that if you look inside a stuck email you will see that info@domin1 is sending to users in the servername.domain1 server and the info@domain2 will be sending to users in the info@servername.domain2 section.

Apple certainly made some interesting changes under the hood in the way email is behaving.

Thanks to everyone who helped here - it is mostly working now but I still get the odd email that gets stuck in the queue. One of our couriers sends a pick up confirmation - which is clearly a malformed email and they get stuck every time. Also - our own online order confirmations lose the subject line when they are processed by the list server - they don't get stuck but they do lose the subject line.

So it seems to be senstivie to the formatting of the messages - not much we can do about that but hope we get a more robust version in future.

After upgrade to OS X Server 4.0.3, we still have issue with the Groups mail.  Are you guys still having the same issue after upgrade?

After upgrading to Server App 4 & losing group email, i deleted and re-added all groups.

Restarted the server and all the missing group emails were suddenly delivered.

No recurring issues with subsequent Server App updates, groups are still working as normal.

The one thing i will note is that our main server is actually running 10.10.2 beta 2, as file sharing in a mixed environment was excruciating poor prior to the beta installs.

Good morning,

     I have been running with the same and since I have setup the aliases and main for the server and the groups are still delivering as expected. Have you made sure you users have user@domainname and user@servername.domain in the users account. You also need to make sure the email system recognizes both domain and server.domain so it can deliver for both domains.

Fresh install of OS X Server 4.1 with the former directory users imported. Facing the same issue as everyone else.

I noticed in /Library/Server/Mail/Config/MailServicesOther.plist, you can enable debug logging for the list server:

<key>list_server</key>

<dict>

  <key>dest_domain</key>

  <string>example.com</string>

  <key>list_server_log_level</key>

<string>debug</string>

....

Bizarrely, when I now send a message, the list server even lists the members, and then says no members found:

May  3 13:01:06 server.example.com list_server_agent[12758] <Debug>: initalized recipient cache: marketing

May  3 13:01:06 server.example.com list_server_agent[12758] <Debug>: expanding group: marketing

May  3 13:01:06 server.example.com list_server_agent[12758] <Debug>: fetching nested groups within: marketing

May  3 13:01:06 server.example.com list_server_agent[12758] <Debug>: carlee is member of mail SACL

May  3 13:01:06 server.example.com list_server_agent[12758] <Debug>: sophie is member of mail SACL

May  3 13:01:06 server.example.com list_server_agent[12758] <Debug>: jaimee is member of mail SACL

May  3 13:01:06 server.example.com list_server_agent[12758] <Error>: no recipients for: marketing

This makes no sense at all. I have no SACL's set for Mail, or any other service in case anyone's curious.