In order to ensure application generated email's are sent correctly you will need to specify the SMTP server used to send email's generated by InstantForum.NET. Typically you'll simply require the SMTP server address however if your mail server uses SMTP authentication you'll also need to specify a username & password.
You can enter the SMTP server information from within the InstantForum.NET Admin Control Panel. If your logged in as an administrator click the small Admin CP link on the top right of your forum. From within the Admin Control Panel locate the Manage Settings panel on the left and click the "Email & RSS Settings" as shown below…
Pop your SMTP server information here and click Save Settings.
To quickest way to test emails are working is to update your member username. This generates an email informing you of the username change. From within the Admin CP locate the Members & Groups panel on the left and click Manage Members. Edit your profile and choose to update your username. This will generate an email.
To view the email within your mail queue locate the Communications panel on the left within the Admin CP and click Manage Queued Emails. You should see all emails awaiting to be sent here within this queue.
If there is any problem sending the emails it will be indicated next to the message on the manage queued emails page. You may need to refresh the queued email list to show failure notifications.
Emails generated by InstantForum.NET are sent on a IIS background thread for performance reasons so any exceptions raised when sending emails will not be shown to end users. By default InstantForum.NET will attempt to send any emails within the email queue every 60 seconds. You can change this interval by configuring the "InstantASP_EmailInterval" application setting within he web.config.
If you have direct access to your database you can monitor emails within the email queue by opening the InstantASP_Emails database table.
The steps below will enable you to see actual .NET exception messages raised by the System.Net classes if there are any problems sending emails from InstantForum.NET. This may help you debug email problems.
1. Open the InstantForum.NET web.config
2. Change the InstantASP_AutoFlushMailQueue setting to True as shown below...
<add key="InstantASP_AutoFlushMailQueue" value="True" />
3. Change the InstantASP_EnableSMTPDebug setting to True as shown below...
<add key="InstantASP_EnableSMTPDebug" value="True" />
These changes will ensure InstantForum.NET attempts to send emails immediately & will also ensure the actual error message is displayed if your experiencing problems semdomg emails.
If you require any assistance with any email questions please contact us.