Notification eMails stopped working

Please see KB 46840: Acronis True Image: Troubleshooting E-mail Notification Issues which has links to other documents that may help.

You can also set global email notifications which are less prone (in my experience) to problems. Open ATI, select settings and then select notifications, which takes you to web base interface. The emails are sent by Acronis Server not by the local computer which avoids many potential issues.

Ian

I am seeing this too.  ATIH 2017 and Win10/x64 with Windows Defender.  Something has for sure changed in the last week.  I know my email settings are correct and proper and other clients work without issue.

As suggested I did put my email address in and selected all three levels of notification and I kicked off a small backup and I did get email notification of a successful job.  I did a complete uninstall and reinstall with 8058 with no success.  To be clear, I am not using the cloud and backing up to storage locally on a different physical disk drive in my PC.  The locally sourced email does seem to be the issue.  I do not get the same data that I used to get when the email originated locally.

My ISP and email settings have not changed.  Acronis 2017 has not changed.  I can only fathom that something in Windows has changed to cause this to break.  

In Windows defender, I do see the two exclusions listed (as processes) for TrueImageHomeNotify.exe as well as TrueImageHomeService.exe.

Identical to the thread originator, when I send a test message in my notification tab, I see "Failed to send the test email.  Check the specified email settings". 

Is there any way we can find out specifically what is happening (e.g. a log file with the failure code)?

Chris, welcome to these User Forums.

What are your email server settings that you are using here (without any personal / password details)?  What port and security option?

All my email notifications using Gmail have continued to work fine with both ATI 2017 & 2018 on my Windows 10 & 7 systems.

Hi Steve-

I do have a gmail account, but I always have used my Comcast account.  I can try my gmail.  Maybe Comcast has blocked these emails now?  I didn't consider that.

Settings: 

Both top tick boxes are checked:  Show notification message on insufficient disk space, Notify is stock at 100 MB. Send emails about the operation state is also checked.

To:  (my email address @comcast.net)

Server Settings:  smtp.comcast.net       port 465       encryption:  SSL

SMTP Authentication is checked

Username:  (my email address @comcast.net) - Note that I have tried it with and without @comcast.net - both seem to work on Comcast)

Password:  (my email password for comcast.net - hasn't changed in a while) 

Thanks-

Chris.

Chris, one change worth trying is to switch your encryption from SSL to TLS with port 587 - it may be that Comcast have followed the example of other providers and stopped accepting insecure SSL which Acronis is still using.

See webpage:

where Google did this back in 2016 and broke a lot of notifications for Acronis users.

Hi Steve - yes - that worked.  Changing to 587 and TLS worked like a charm.

Thanks!

Chris, that is good to hear, glad the change worked for you and thanks for giving the feedback.

Steve I too had this problem and think I fixed it but am getting a different email form than before. The first pic is old and other two are the new ones? How do I set this up to send the old email? This all started on 5/14/2017. Help...

Richard, welcome to these User Forums.

Your first screen image shows the email notifications that Acronis generates according to your email notification settings in your online Dashboard.

The other screen images show the notifications that are generated by configuring the Notification page settings in your ATI 2017/8 GUI for your backup task (where you click on Options), hence why there is a lot of difference between the two.

To see the first option, click on the Account page in the ATI GUI, then on the button to 'Open Online Dashboard' - once the Dashboard has opened for your Account, then click on the icon as shown in the screen image below, then on the option for Email notification settings.

Note: There has been reports of problems with these Acronis email notifications in the forum over the last couple of days - see forum topic: Not getting email report on backup tasks

This is how I have set up the setting. What do I need to change to get my old style of emails?

Richard, your settings are the same as I have (apart from the obvious email address) - please post a comment in the other forum topic that I referenced in my Note above to register that you too are not getting these emails from Acronis for your account.  This is an issue that Acronis need to fix on their Dashboard systems where these mails are generated from.

For me, the latest ATI 2018 Build (build 11530) broke global email notifications...

François

François, please create a support case - the more people who contact Acronis support about the problem, the more likely we are to get a solution. In the support request please include a link to this thread and mention my existing support case 03348806. [Just realised that this thread is discussion emails scheduled through the backup task settings rather than global setting, so the support case number is not relevant]

Ian

My email notifications stopped working about a week ago.  I am not sure of the exact date because I recently removed all the emails.  No changes to the email settings have been made in over a year and the notifications were very reliable.

Acronis True Image 2016 running on Windows 7 64-bit backing up to NAS drive to local disk drive.

Please note that there are 2 different forms of Email Notifications - one that you configure for each backup task in the ATI GUI using the Notifications page - these are still working for me provided you have the correct settings for the email server you are using.  The second is the web notifications that come from the Acronis Dashboard / web servers - these look to have stopped working for a wide range of users across the world - this is a known issue that Acronis are investigating and for which several support cases have been submitted by users.

I am using the ATI GUI Notification page.  I have been receiving the notifications successfully for several years.  They just stopped working a couple of weeks ago and now when I try to send a test message, I get the error: "Failed to send the test e-mail.  Check the specified e-mail settings.".  No changes to the backup task or any of the e-mail notification values have been made.  The nightly backups are running successfully, I just do not get any notification messages.

The GoDaddy e-mail server settings have not changed.  I verified the the e-mail account is active and can send and receive messages while logged in to Workspace (GoDaddy webmail client).

Servername: smtpout.secureserver.net

Port: 465

Encryption: SSL

Username and password are the same as I used to run the test from Workspace webmail.

I suspect that your GoDaddy ISP has tightened their security and are no longer accepting the very old version of SSL that ATI is still using!  Try changing to using TLS with Port 587 which is what I have been using since Google did the same a couple of years back.

After being jerked around by Acronis Support for close to 2 months now, I appreciate someone in here actual posting a solution. I switched from SSL to TLS and it worked. Thank You!!

I am sooo disgusted with Acronis support.... their suggestion was for me to install different email clients... wow... like somehow having a gmail account or using thunderbird my isp would suddenly say....ohhhh okay... roflmao...

I wish they would own up to their issues.... so insulting and infuriating.... I am so disgusted with them... anyway, thanks STEVE!!!

I called GoDaddy support to see if our email server supports TLS, but it does not.  The newer Office 365 servers use TLS by default.  We had added a SPF record to our DNS settings to help stop our GoDaddy email from being flagged as SPAM when received by others.  Their suggestion to see if that was the problem was to remove the SPF record.  I passed on that suggestion because adding it stopped the problem we were having.  The SPF record may have nothing to do with the ATI notifications not working, but it was around the time that the notification failures started.

I dropped the SSL setting and set encryption to NONE and port 25 and the notification messages are being sent.  That is all I really care about.  I would still like to know why the SSL setting stopped working, but do not have much time to research.  Thanks for all the replies.

My ATI 2018 notification emails generated from the GUI are having problems also.  Nightly, I have two backups run an hour apart.  Suddenly, one of the backups stopped sending a "success" notice.  When I run the "send test," it works fine, so I'm guessing it's nothing that's changed on my end.  I've been using port/enc 587/tls all along just fine also.  On recommendation, I'm turning on the web-based notification as a stop-gap measure.  Oddly, the backup job that fails is the first job, set for 1 a.m.  The second job, set for 2 a.m., sends "success" without fail.  I will move the second job to 3 a.m., just to give the first one more time to finish -- but both jobs do show as having completed successfully.  

Perhaps more ominously, some time ago I noticed that the notifications -- one or both -- would sometimes generate two identical emails upon successful completion.  I've just been ignoring them.  Now THAT looks like a problem with my ISP, Yahoo.  Not sure.

I'm pretty sure, looking in my Deleted folder and at sent email notifications, that the last time this ran cleanly was May 16.  

One final oddity, Windows 10 "notifications" from the taskbar occasionally complains that something is trying to access a "TIB" file.  I usually don't know how to answer:  I sometimes "allow for an hour" or "ignore."  Not sure what to do.  I see it in the morning on occasion when I check the PC's operation.  Once I click on the Windows message, it disappears -- or else I'd capture and share it.  If it happens again, I'll post.

Thanks!!!

OK.  The email notifications for successful backups has been incredibly inconsistent.  

There was no difference when I turned on the web-based notification; I see nothing new happening.  I know this works on another machine, when I forget to connect the backup disk and when it runs successfully.  

I did move the backup jobs farther apart.  Their length of time of operation should not have been a problem anyway.  Again, no changed in inconsistency.  Yesterday I got an email notification from the second scheduled backup, set for 3 a.m., but not the 1 a.m. job.  But opening the application, I can see that both jobs ran successfully (verified by looking at the files on the backup disks).

I just checked the online dashboard and the checkbox to send notification upon success was unchecked.  That's not the way I left it the other day after clicking on Save.

And today, just before I logged into this support site, surprisingly BOTH backup job notifications appear in my Yahoo inbox.  What's going on?

Dane, the first check point I would suggest looking at is the Outbox for the SMTP account you are using for your email notifications (assuming these are those that are configured using the Notifications page in the task options).

This will tell you if ATI sent the email to the SMTP server to send on to your Yahoo account?

With regard to the Acronis web notification service, sorry but that has had problems for months that remain unresolved for lots of users, myself included!

I don't have a Yahoo account but my own notification emails using my Gmail account SMTP server is working fine for all my backup tasks, sometimes with a little delay but always received within a short period of the task completing.

Steve, thanks for the feedback.

I am confused by your suggestion to look at the Outbox for the SMTP account.  I can look at the most recent successful messages received, in raw format, and try to discern.  Of course, I can only look at the successful messages I receive in my Yahoo Inbox.  From my uneducated inspection, all looks OK. 

Recall that if I elect to send a test message from either of the two backup jobs, they run successfully.  That tells me that email from API to my PC and out to Yahoo works every time I kick it off manually.

Here are some of the raw email screenshots from today's successful notifications received post backup job operations.  

Dane, your task configuration screen shot shows as below:

This means that all the notification emails are being sent via your Yahoo account used for the SMTP authentication, therefore if ATI has sent out the emails they will show in the Sent (Outbox) for that Yahoo account.  This will confirm that any issues with them reaching your Yahoo Inbox lies with the Yahoo mail servers if there are problems after they were sent?

I use Gmail and see the following for my own notifications in my Gmail Sent folder.

I do not send these notifications to the same Gmail account so this is a quick way to check they were sent if they don't arrive at the target account I am sending to.

OK.  I looked in the Sent folder.  Whenever I receive an occasional email on successful backup, it appears in the Inbox and Sent folder.  Today only one of the backups managed to get a notification to my Inbox and, yes, there is a copy of it in the Sent folder.  I should mention that often, the notification shows twice.  I get an exact duplicate, same time -- everything -- in both the Inbox and Sent folder.  

Also today, the Dashboard web interface managed to send accurate Success emails to my Inbox for BOTH backup jobs (no duplication there).  If I could depend on the web tool to send the notifications, I'd be glad to switch off my machine-based notifications using Yahoo.

My previous message showed raw email text.  I'm not smart enough to know whether ATI is generating the text just by looking at the code.  Here's not-raw text from today's one job (but received in duplicate) that did generate an email from Yahoo.

If you wish, I can post an image of text received from the Dashboard, if that would be useful.

Thanks, Steve, for looking at this.  I may be time to upgrade this 2018 version.  I think my other machine, a laptop, is sending notification OK.  But that backup job, while scheduled, only runs on early Sunday morning and only when I remember to plug in the SSD.

Dane 

I may be time to upgrade this 2018 version. 

Dane, take a look at https://www.acronis.com/en-us/personal/computer-backup/beta/ where you could participate in the Beta testing for the next version of ATI (2021) which will be released later this year.

Just to follow up.  Today not only did I get local (my machine) notifications from my two nightly backup jobs, but I also got two notifications from the web-based Dashboard tool.

This is so inconsistent.

Dane

Howdy folks,

I don't know if this is the right place to put this, but I'm running Acronis 12.5, and I can't get the email notifications to work. I've tried hotmail, outlook, and gmail, and I believe I got the settings correct, following several Acronis email troubleshooting guides. I don't receive the test email whenever I send it, but it doesn't throw any errors. I just set the system up, so I don't have any history of successful emails.

I am able to send and receive regular email on the server machine. 

If you guys point me in the general direction, I would greatly appreciate it!

Hunter, sorry but you probably need to post your issue to the Acronis Cyber Backup 12.5 Forum as that is the product you have, not True Image.

See forum topic: How to get email notifications to GMAIL now that Goggle is shutting down less secure app access May 30, 2022 - which documents a work-around for Gmail users.

Hey Steve,

Thank you for the prompt response. I was able to get the issue resolved. In addition to setting up the windows firewall, I also had to punch a hole through port 587 in our DMZ.

I am now receiving the email notifications.