Email notifications stuck in Mail status

Question

Hi,
The notification mailer is up and running and we receive emails when we run the test. However, when a user goes through the application, lets say the Purchase requisition process, the process completes successfully, we see the notification in his worklist, we see the notification in the wf_notifications table with status of MAIL, but the user does not get the email notification. The email address is defined both on the employee record and on the user record. The background process is running but it doesn't pick up the notification. After a while the notification gets expired.
does anyone have any clue as to why the test notification from the mailer works but we don't get an email when we go thru the requisition process although it completes successfully ?
Any help is appreciated.
Regards
Preeti

Answer 1

There are various aspects to troubleshooting this issue.
Let me explain the mailer architecture in a nutshell and then troubleshooting tips.
1. Notification activity in a workflow process is executed by the engine. The activity makes an entry in WF_NOTIFICATIONS table with appropriate values for RECIPIENT_ROLE, SUBJECT and MAIL_STATUS based on recipient's notification preference.
2. At the same time, an business event is raised for that notification and enqueued on to the WF_DEFERRED queue.
3. The Workflow Deferred Agent Listener dequeues the event, builds a XML message for that notification and enqueues it again to WF_NOTIFICATION_OUT queue.
4. Workflow Notification Mailer polls the WF_NOTIFICATION_OUT queue and when a message arrives, it dequeues it, parses the XML for that notification and builds a MIME message. Sends the MIME message to the intended recipient_role's e-mail address.
In summary the message for e-mail goes like this...
Ntf Activity -> WF_DEFERRED -> WF_NOTIFICATION_OUT -> Notification Mailer Now things to check.
1. Is the Deferred Agent Listener or Deferred Notification Agent Listener running?
2. Is the Notification Mailer running with Correlation ID parameter set to null? Because the mailer could be configured to only process e-mail notifications from a specific Item Type.
3. Is the intended RECIPIENT_ROLE's e-mail address and notification_preference values in WF_ROLES view correct? The email address should be valid and notification preference should be MAIL%.
There is a debug script $FND_TOP/sql/wfmlrdbg.sql. Run this for the given notification id and you will be able to see in which queue the message is stuck.
Hope this helps.