General help

there is no easy way to get Moodle to resend all emails that have previously failed.

But if you remove the smtphosts config setting in admin > Server >Email > Outgoing mail configuration (and leave it blank)

then as per the description under that setting "If you leave this field blank, Moodle will use the PHP default method of sending mail." - which will likely pass it to sendmail on your local server. (as long as PHP is configured this way - it should be, it's the default method.)

Hi Stefan

Your admins said:
> The question is not, how we could resend from our mail-server, the question is, how moodle can resend.

As Dan have confirmed, you can not ask Moodle to _resend_ its mails (if it has already sent that is).

> Our setup are one moodle-server (on alice), a mail-server (on alice, too), a mail-server (on ben). moodle -> localhost -> ben.

That is a common setup. We call it Moodle -> localhost (mail relay) -> actual SMTP server.

> The mail-server on alice did not get any mail, because it was not reachable.

Could you ask them to recheck this statement? 'alice' is the localhost of Moodle. It is odd that the localhost was not reachable. (Well, not impossible, e.g. if the SMTP has died.)

> How we can resend the mail, moodle failed to send? «moodle-mail -q»?

As already said, there is no such thing.

If the statement above, that SMTP daemon on localhost was not really available, is correct, then Moodle must received SMTP errors. Unless you've had some debugging activated, you can't be sure. You can simulate it though: kill the SMTP daemon on the localhost, raise the debugging level and try messaging somebody through Moodle.

If it was ben, the real SMTP server, which was out, depending on the duration of the breakdown, alice (the mail-relay) may still have the mails in its spool. You need somebody who knows the intricacies of the mail server programs used. (Mail relay is also a kind of mail server, just limited in function.)

> If not, how we can configure moodle to use sendmail instead of smtp, to prevent lost mails in future?

I will stay with the original subject, ways to salvage lost mails.

> For your information, if not possible: smtp never does promise to accept a mail. Also if server is running on localhost.

Your mail admins are confused. "smtp never does promise to accept a mail" is total nonsense. If SMTP quit a mail with ok, it means it has accepted the mail. It does not promise to _deliver_ it, though.

> A restart of the mail-server would be enough to lost mails.

That could be true. See "depending on the duration of the breakdown, alice may have the mails still in its mail spool" above.

> So it is a stupid idea to use smtp for sending mails, if moodle has no possible way to resend mails. It has to have a Queue. If you say "mail-server should run on localhost to prevent most issues", than you should not support smtp and use sendmail. (But we did not found an option in moodle to do that and google sais no.)

Your mail admins are pragmatists who haven't studied the networking part of it, but just shout instead. Stupit idea!


For your reference: 'sendmail' is a _program_ whereas SMTP is a _protocol_. It so happens that sendmail masters SMTP, but not the only one. They are neither synonymous nor competitors.