PHPJunkyard support forum

Hi folks

I've been using HESK for several months now as the main helpdesk manager for my small company. It works great, was easy to set up and configure and we've now processed over 500 support tickets through it.

The problem we have quite often though is with regard to the notification e-mails that HESK sends to people who have submitted a ticket. I have the system set to send via PHP mail at the moment and we find that probably 50% of users never receive these messages, they either end up in their junk mail, or never arrive. This is a big problem because we get people phoning up complaining that we haven't replied to support requests, then we have to ask them to check their junk mail etc etc. It seems PHP mail just isn't trusted by many e-mail providers.

Now we actually pay a subscription for our own trusted e-mail smarthost called Spamwall. All our normal Outlook e-mails send via SMTP using this service which is just a URL to the smarthost and the smarthost is configured to accept e-mails coming from our server's IP address. The trouble is, this doesn't work with HESK. When I enter the details for our smarthost into the HESK SMTP settings window I just get an error saying "connection was refused". Doesn't matter what I type, even if I use the IP address of the smarthost server it still doesn't work.

Does anybody else struggle with this type of issue? I'm just looking for some hints and tips. Our smarthost provider says that their logs don't even show HESK as having tried to communicate.

many thanks

Graham

A "connection was refused" error means Hesk isn't even able to connect to the SMTP server.

Ask your host to verify that port 587 (or whichever you use for smtp) on the server where Hesk is hosted is open (both form inbound and outbound traffic) to be able to send via SMTP. This is easiest to verify if you try to telnet from your server to the SMTP server and see if the connection is possible.

If the port is open and you can connect to the SMTP from the sever using telnet, try with different SSL/TLS settings (one off, both off, both on).

Hi, thanks for the reply.

I phoned our hosting provider (GoDaddy) who told me that they don't support the use of external SMTP hosts and that we would have to use their own relays. I'm not sure why but I never even thought to try just entering "localhost" into the SMTP server box in HESK. I did this and it just worked straight away!

Many thanks.