vCenter Alarm Email Notification Is Not Being Sent Due To Invalid Route Address or due to Illegal semicolon delimiter

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Alarms configured to send email notifications to one or multiple email addresses using the semicolon (;) delimiter fail to deliver.

• The following alarm error is observed in the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA):

  • Alarm 'nameofalarm' on <vCenterServerFQDN> cannot send email to <emailaddress1>;<emailaddress2>;

• In the vCenter /var/mail/root logs, entries indicate a failed routing address:

  • /var/mail/root 
Final-Recipient: RFC822; <emailaddress1>;<emailaddress2>;
X-Actual-Recipient: rfc822; “553 Invalid route address”@<vcsaname>.<domainname>
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.3

• In the vCenter messages.log, multiple emails separated by semicolons return an Invalid route address error:

  • /var/log/vmware/messages.log
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.200528+05:30 TS##-####sendmail[2132023]: 57L4gBP62132023: 57L4gBP72132023: DSN: example.com;example1.com;example2com;... Invalid route address
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.302558+05:30 TS####-###sendmail[2132028]: 57L4gBXA2132028: 57L4gBXB2132028: DSN:example.com;example1.com;example2com;... Invalid route address
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.364353+05:30 TS##-##-V##1 sendmail[2132041]: 57L4gBud2132041: 57L4gBue2132041: DSN: example.com;example1.com;example2com;;... Invalid route address
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.713639+05:30 T####-##sendmail[2132079]: 57L4gBOa2132079: 57L4gBOb2132079: DSN: example.com;example1.com;example2com;... Invalid route address
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.628262+05:30 TS##-##-## sendmail[2135827]: 57L4l9Ra2135827: 57L4l9Rb2135827: DSN: example.com;example1.com;example2com;... Invalid route address
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.762091+05:30 T##-##-## sendmail[2135832]: 57L4l9Xv2135832: 57L4l9Xw2135832: DSN: example.com;example1.com;example2com;... Invalid route address

  • If using an AWS SES relay, it rejects the payload with a 554 Transaction failed error:
    YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.402538+00:00 vCenterServerFQDN sendmail [891483]: ... relay=email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com [##.##.##.##], dsn=5.0.0, reply=554 Transaction failed: Illegal semicolon, not in group, stat=Service unavailable

Environment

VMware vCenter Server Appliance 7.x, 8.x

VMware Cloud Foundation 5.x

Cause

The underlying Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) or SMTP relay (such as AWS SES) rejects the email payload because the semicolon (;) is not recognized as a valid RFC-compliant delimiter one or multiple recipient addresses.

Resolution

Email addresses need to be separated by a comma (,) for multiple email addresses and not semicolon (;) in alarm action.  Follow the below steps:

1. Log in to the vSphere Client.

2. Navigate to the configured alarm action settings.

3. Replace all semicolon (;) delimiters with commas (,) when defining multiple email addresses.

4. Save the configuration and trigger the alarm to verify successful email delivery.

Workaround:

• Create a separate email notification action for each recipient.
• Configure an email distribution group (alias) on your mail server and use that single address in vCenter.

Additional Information

 Unable to send a notification email from Alarm action if multiple emails are separated by semicolon