filing a ticket on otrs 3 0 6 on windows server 2008 is slow like hell

3 Aug 2011

problem description

when filing a telephone or email ticket often several recipients are contacted via email. dependent on the otrs configuration this is done in sync, so that a user gets success or fail for message sending in realtime. that means if no local mailserver is used it can be quite time consuming.

for example: filing a ticket here for say the ‘inhouse support crew’ would issue 5 emails and using an external mailserver that means:

5x 1,2 seconds ~= 5-8 seconds

where the otrs-GUI is frozen for the user after clicking ‘create’. dependent on how busy the remote email server is this can hinder usability quite fast.

so this post might be interesting for everyone who wants to use otrs but does not also operate a in-house mailserver.

my setup

otrs 3.0.6
windows server 2008 r2
no local mailserver

the solution

windows server 2008 has support for a local smtp server (smart host setup or satellite system setup) which can be used as relay. this setup is very easy is much better than using an external mailserver directly because the microsoft smtp relay server has also a local queue so messages won’t get lost if there is a partial network failure.

so basically i used [1], [2], [3], [4] to create the setup.

important points where:

using smtp.mail.emea.microsoftonline.com
tls encryption
user/pass authentification

after the configuration is final:

test the setup using: ‘telnet localhost 25’ and type the commands as found in [5].

the ms smtp relay queue

one should keep an eye on the queue which is in: **c:*

the otrs configuration

use the webinterface and login as root@localhost:

in otrs one has to login, go to admin->sysconfig->type smtp into the search bar, then ‘Core::Sendmail’, in there configure:

SendMailModule -> SMTP
SendMailModule::Host ->** localhost**
SendMailModule::Port -> 25
disable AuthUser/AuthPassword

finally you are done and should file a ticket (which is known to produce an email as a side-effect) and check if that mail is sent.

Note: i like that this smtp relay has a local queue, that is what i’ve been missing on linux for ages… (which is quite sad)