This post highlights an interesting issue I found relating to Chris21 email security while assisting a client with the latest Chris21 upgrade. In this case, to version 8.13. This issue doesn’t relate to the upgrade itself but rather a Chris21 process and email security configured on the organisation’s mail server.
In a nutshell, I had an issue running an archiving process in Chris21. It was strange because I had run this same process in the Test environment when testing the upgrade and had no issues. It was only when I came to do this in the Live environment that the issue appeared. Not what I wanted to see because my testing is supposed to address any issues before the Live upgrade.
The error message didn’t help, they often don’t. It told me that the form I was trying to run the process from didn’t exist in Chris21. I know it did because I was using the form to try to run the archive process.
I got to the solution because I had received an email from the Chris21 system saying my email was undeliverable. That got me thinking maybe email security was somehow blocking the Chris21 process. It didn’t make sense how that could be the case, but I investigated anyway.
I found that my email address in the client system (on Details – DET) was not a valid email address for the client organisation, it was an ‘external’ email address. When I changed it to a valid email address (assigned to me by the client organisation) I found the archive process worked as normal.
What was happening here is the organisation had tightened up their email security and this caused the issue I have described. The explanation as to why my testing didn’t uncover this? The Test server did not have the same security configuration as the Live server.
This is something that is worthwhile remembering if you are troubleshooting issues in Chris21. I would be interested to hear if anyone has had similar experiences.