Understanding RT outbound and inbound emails

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I’m trying to understand how RT outbound and inbound mail works.

  1. First question, if I don’t want inbound email to work, do I need to configure anything regarding sendmail or mail gateway? But I do need RT to send email notifications about new tickets, reminders, etc.

  2. What tool does RT use to send email notifications like on ticket create/update etc. I installed RT 4.4.3 on centos 7 and these notifications work out of the box. I didn’t have to configure any sendmail or postfix or whatever. What does RT use to send those emails?

  3. But when I tried setting up a cronjob to send reminder notifications 2 hours before the reminder is due, it does not work. My cron works, I tested it. So does it need the sendmail or whatever configured? Then why are the ticket notifications work?

  4. And if I do need inbound email to work, is there a step by step guide to configure it? There is so much documentation and all is so scattered it’s so difficult to gather all together when you’re not a linux administrator. I need to set it up to work with my gmail account.

Please help.

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I would strongly suggest you speak to the people who manage your email. Best Practical do offer paid support packages

Regards

Garru

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RT will use the system’s local mailer. Most unixlike systems install postfix or sendmail automatically so that apps can at least do local messaging. Whats probably happened is the network you installed your RT instance on has either by chance or by design let systems running on it send outbound email, so everything so happens to “just work”. Check the file /var/log/maillog, thats sometimes where you can see messaging logging.

The next step to troubleshoot this is to run the command that the cron job is running manually at a command line. You’ll want to do this as the same user you’re running the cron job as. Then see if it outputs errors, or check logs for error messages.

Unfortunately theres not just one guide because every organization’s email topography is different. I’ve installed RT in dozens of locations, and not a single one was the same as the other. Theres always variations. Unfortunately its just the nature of this type of software. The easiest thing to do for your situation is probably a tool called fetchmail. Here is the wiki entry on that: Fetchmail - Request Tracker Wiki

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Thanks Todd for your answer.