How does Pivotal sends emails?

Pivotal can send emails from either client or server side:

• Client side: Pivotal will always use MAPI (Outlook or LotusNotes) to send emails. You just need to have your email client appropriately configured.
• Server side: here we have two options:
• Use the email client (Outlook or Lotus Notes)
• Use SMTP

In all the projects where I’ve participated the SMTP option for server side emails has always been used, mostly because SMTP is the preferred choice for IT and because having Outlook configured on a server is not the preferred choice. This is why development projects (either developed on premise or on the Client’s infrastructure) always need to be using SMTP. Of course, if SMTP is the option we’ll be using, unit and functional tests will need to be made using SMTP.

Following is a brief overview of the configuration for having server side emails working on Pivotal.

Server side emails using Outlook

Emails are sent by the PBS (Pivotal Business Server) component. PBS executes under a security context identified by credentials. By default, when PBS is first installed, these credentials will be "Interactive User”. This means that the PBS will be executing with the credentials of the currently logged-in user. This also means that when an email is sent using Outlook the PBS will be using the Outlook profile for the logged-in user. The right thing to do is to configure the PBS to use a specific account. In this case the PBS will be using the Outlook profile configured for such account (in the example the “macv607\pbs” user). You will need to login on the computer with that account and configure Outlook to send/receive emails. Do some tests to make sure that the Outlook client works fine.

Server side emails using SMTP

Emails are sent by the PBS, but these will be sent using the SMTP protocol. The SMTP configuration is made using the Pivotal Configuration Utility. If the “Use SMTP for Sending E-mail” is checked then the PBS will use SMTP as its first option for sending email. This means that it will not use Outlook. This is the right choice for most projects.

Considerations when using SMTP

• Using Office 365: Office 365 uses strict security protocols (secure SMTP and requires authentication). The SMTP configuration screen for Pivotal doesn’t allow to use secure SMTP. This means that you will not be able to use SMTP for Office 365. If this is the case then you must use Outlook to send server side emails.
• For development, the common thing to do is to configure a local SMTP server. You could use any SMTP server, but I recommend hMailServer, a powerful free email server that supports SMTP, POP, IMAP, etc.
• You will use Outlook to see the emails sent by the PBS. You will have to configure Outlook to use the SMTP server you set up for the development/tests. Here is an example of how to configured Outlook to access the hMailServer: