Debugging Siebel eMail Response !!

In our Siebel application, we are using OOB functionality for creating Service Requests via emails, and yes I think you guessed it right we are using Siebel eMail Response workflows which are available in Siebel Tools and you just need to configure them as per your need and these works really well.

(For people who are new to this subject, to find these workflows you need to query in Siebel tools as "eMail Response*", and if you want to learn configure these, just follow the simple steps given in Communications Server Administration Guide)

I really like this OOB feature of Siebel as it works like a magic: user sends an email to Siebel email box whichever you have configured, Response Group keeps monitoring that and whenever see a new email just picks it up, delete it from the email box and invoke the Siebel Workflow. Now from here you can do anything what any workflow in Siebel is capable of doing, design your workflow as per the requirement and you are done.

Pretty simple isn't it, but sometimes it tough to debug it if you land-up in some issue here. I was working on the similar kind of requirement where everything seems working fine but the only problem was: "Response Group was not able to pick the email from Siebel email box".

Response Group only job is to just pick the email and create a MIME format file in "<_siebsrvr>/bin/incoming" folder and passes it as an input argument to eMail Response workflow, but since Response Group was not able to pick the email, so I thought of confirming whether it is reaching to the Siebel emailbox or not, so I logged into webmail client and found all emails keep lying there only.

Since I was able to see all the emails and I have also verified the username/password being used for the email profile in Siebel was correct, that means there is some problem with the POP3 setting of the emailbox. So to check it what you can do is :

a) Get the POP3 server name / username / password for the emailbox which is being monitored by reponse group. (You can find it in "Administration - Communications -> Communications Drivers and Profiles" view by querying for the communication drivers as "Internet SMTP/POP3 Server" and check the name in "Profile Parameter overrides" applet).

b) Click Start -> Run -> type "telnet <_servername> pop3", hit enter.

c) In Telnet window, type "USER <_username>" (without quotes)
if you see +OK, that means username is correct.

d) Type "PASS <_password>" (without quotes)
if you see +OK, that means password is correct.

But I recieved an error message saying "Unknown username or bad password"

So this is something we can't control from Siebel, I checked with the Server administration team who handles all the email servers and they fixed the issue for POP3 settings on the email box and tried the above steps again and this time no error.
[Server admin people really likes to resolve the issue when you go to them with the exact root cause ;) ]

One more reason I can think of for such a behaviour when you have not clicked on "Submit Response Group Changes" for the Response group monitoring the emailbox.

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