Skip to content

Feature - New Option to Create Email Logs with User ID in File Name

← Elliott Version 8
Release date: 01/22/2017

In Elliott V8, if you choose the SMTP interface to send emails, one common complaint from users is that they don't see a list of emails they sent from Elliott in their email outbox. This is because the SMTP interface does not send email through the user's local email client.

To address this issue, Elliott V8 creates email log files to record all email activities sent from Elliott. Normally, email log files follow this pattern:
   <ElliottRoot>\Log\<CompanNo>\EmailLog-YYMMDDHHMMSS.CSV
where <ElliottRoot> is the Elliott root folder like M:\Elliott7, <CompanyNo> is the Company ID like 01, 02...etc. YYMMDDHHMMSS is the date and military time like 180102111023, which means the log file was created on 01/02/2018 11:10:23.  See the following sample:


Generally speaking, the system will create one email log file per month, usually in the beginning of the month.  Sometimes, when two users try to append to the same email log file at the same time, the first user will prevail, and the second user will then have to create a new email log file by using then current date time stamp.  Any future new email activities will be append to this new file until there's a conflict or a new month is reached. So under some situations, it is possible that a user site may have multiple email log files per month. 

In certain high-traffic situations, users may create multiple email log files per day.  In one incident, we saw a user create several hundred email log files per day. This bothered the user. In this incident, the particular user site had multiple users running mass emails at the same time.  The fact that this user site used a hosted email solution (Outlook 365) resulted in longer email processing time due to extra communication time with the cloud, which could have also exacerbated the problem. Recently, the code was changed to help minimize the number of email log files created for this scenario, and that may be enough to reduce the number of email log files created each month.  

This new feature is another option to help prevent generating too many email log files.  Using this feature, one would expect that each Elliott user would have one email log file per month.

This option will make each log file follow this pattern:
     <ElliottRoot>\Log\<CompanNo>\Email-Log-<UserID>-YYMMDDHHMMSS.CSV
where <UserID> is the Elliott UserID and YYMMDDHHMMSS is the date and time. 

To use this option, manually modify <EllliottRoot>\Bin\EL800.CFG to include this option in the [Configuration] section:
   LogEmailByUser=Yes
The following is an example of how the email log files will appear after this change:


Generally speaking, you don't want to turn on this flag because that will create more email log files than necessary in most situations.  It also makes email auditing more difficult. On 1/18/2018, we had also made a change so now system will retry a few times before creating a new email log file.  We believe this retry logic will signficantly descrease the likelyhood of creating multiple email log files per day.  So after you download the latest Elliott update (any version released after 1/18/2018), you should observe and determine if it is necessary to turn on this feature.

Programs modified: EmailService.VB

JEG

Feedback and Knowledge Base

(thinking…)