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8 OpenEMM Testing

For testing (and to initialize the system) you should first make sure that MariaDB contains the OpenEMM database and the DBMS is already up and running.

If you are not sure about OpenEMM’s status use the first menu Show OpenEMM status of OST to check it and use menu Restart OpenEMM to restart the software if it does not look right.

To test the correct operation of each service we recommend

  • creating a new mailing (testing the GUI of the frontend)
  • sending the mailing to an existing email address (testing the backend)
  • and sending it to an non-existing email address (testing the bounce management)*
  • opening the mail and clicking the links (testing the redirect service of the frontend)
  • checking in mailing statistics if openings and clicks were recorded (testing the redirect service and statistics service of the frontend)

*To test the bounce management you have to send the mailing not to admin or test recipients, but to normal recipients, because due to performance reasons mailings to admin and test recipients are sent out instantly without the overhead of a regular mailing. For that reason the bounce management process can not be applied to mailings for admin and test recipients.

Please note: Most statistics of OpenEMM are generated by a separate statistics service. For communication between the GUI of OpenEMM (emm service) and the statistics service, OpenEMM users must enable cookies in the web browser which is used to access OpenEMM. Otherwise, the GUI can not display the results provided by the statistics service.

If you hide OpenEMM behind firewalls and proxies and have problems to access the OpenEMM GUI, check Tomcat log catalina.out for any errors. If you see errors regarding CSRF protection, you may disable it with

UPDATE config_tbl SET value='false' WHERE class='security' AND name='csrfProtection.enabled';

at the cost of missing CSRF protection.

8.1 Troubleshooting: OpenEMM Does Not Send Emails

The most “popular” problem of OpenEMM is, that no emails are sent out. Therefore, we have compiled a checklist with the most common reasons why OpenEMM does not send emails:

  1. The mailing or the choosen target group has no recipients
  2. OpenEMM has not been started. Please restart with Restart menu of OST.
  3. Postfix' mail log file in /var/log/maillog shows errors.
  4. Packages postfix and sendmail-milter are not installed.
  5. Postfix has not been started (check with command "systemctl status postfix" and start with "systemctl start postfix").
  6. Postfix is no longer running (check with "ps aux | grep postfix/master").
  7. Postfix' mailqueue at /var/spool/postfix does not exist (solution: re-install Postfix).
  8. The wrong MTA is active (Sendmail, qmail, Exim, etc.).
  9. Port 25 has not been opened in the firewall.
  10. Service cron is disabled (check with "systemctl status crond").
  11. SELinux is enabled.
  12. The OpenEMM server uses a virus scanner that prevents the start of the XML RPC backend process (see file backend.log in directory /home/openemm/log/ for an entry like "Error: Could not find or load main class org.agnitas.backend.MailoutServerXMLRPC")
  13. For reverse lookups, no PTR record does exist for the IP address of the OpenEMM server (so that mails are blocked as spam by mailbox providers on the receiving end).