Email notifications- SmtpStatusCode: GeneralFailure from BatchPatch service

[doug]

Generally speaking if you see SmtpStatusCode: GeneralFailure (or typo’d in some versions of the software as StmpStatusCode: GeneralFailure) when sending email notifications, it’s due to a problem with the SMTP server either not being online or not being reachable somehow. However, we had a customer recently who reported that BatchPatch would send email notifications without issues when BatchPatch was running with manual interaction (normal mode), but when he installed the BatchPatch service instance, it would always fail to send email notifications with the error noted above, even though it was on the same server and using the same credentials etc. Eventually we tracked it down to an issue with his anti-virus software. In this case the user had McAfee running, and there is a policy in McAfee that was blocking the emails from being sent by the BatchPatch service instance:

Blocked by port blocking rule C:\Program Files (x86)\BatchPatch\service\domain.user\BatchPatchServiceInstance.exe  

Anti-virus Standard Protection:Prevent mass mailing worms from sending mail

[doug]

We had another user with a similar situation where sending from BatchPatch in normal mode worked fine, but SMTP timeout would occur when sending email from the BatchPatch service instance. After review the Exchange logs we discovered the the Exchange “Tarpit” feature, which is an anti-spam feature, was the cause for the issues. While we don’t know why the Tarpit would be triggered only when emails were sent from the service instance as opposed to the normal BatchPatch instance (both use identical code for sending email), the problem was easily resolved by disabling the Tarpit feature on the Exchange BatchPatch receive connector.

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