Outbound system alerts and test emails sent from Email Plugin via SMTP fail to deliver

Products

• VCF Operations

Issue/Introduction

• Testing outbound email settings from the VCF Operations UI reports a successful status, but no delivery log or trace appears for the test emails.
• Test or alert emails sent from VCF Operations are never received by the intended recipients.
• Below warning entries are captured in the VCF Operations analytics logs during email transmission attempts: 

/storage/log/vcops/log/analytics-<node_uuid>.log:

WARN analytics #### [ops@### threadId="###" threadName="ServerConnection on port 1#### Thread #"] [com.vmware.vcops.platform.notification.email.EmailConfig.fromTransmissionConfig] - Unsupported service credential type for Email
WARN analytics #### [ops@### threadId="###" threadName="ServerConnection on port 1#### Thread #"] [com.vmware.statsplatform.persistence.serviceCredential.ServiceCredentialDataService.getServiceCredential] - ServiceCredentialSearchParam cannot be null.

Environment

• VCF Operations 9.x

Cause

• The upstream SMTP server successfully receives and accepts the connection request from VCF Operations, returning an initial success status back to the application (which causes the UI test to show "Successful").
• After accepting the payload, the SMTP server’s local access control policy silently drops the emails. This occurs because the IP addresses for the VCF Operations nodes are missing from the SMTP server’s authorized relay/whitelist rules.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, the VCF Operations node IP addresses must be explicitly authorized on the target SMTP server.

1. Identify the IP addresses of all nodes in the VCF Operations cluster.
2. Contact your internal email/network administration team.
3. Request that all VCF Operations node IP addresses be added to the whitelist / allow-list / permitted relay rules on the target SMTP server.
4. After the IPs are whitelisted, navigate to VCF Operations UI ➜ Administration ➜ Configurations ➜ Outbound Settings ➜ Standard Email Plugin ➜ Edit.
5. Trigger a test email from the configuration page to confirm successful receipt in the recipient inbox.