Yes, you can use the SMTP publisher to receive emails into the system but unfortunately, starting in 2018 it cannot be set up to be fault tolerant. We mention it in the doc here:

“Note: In a fault tolerant installation of FME Server, the Notification Service UDP Publisher and SMTP Publisher are not supported. To receive e-mail notifications, consider the IMAP Publisher instead.”

https://docs.safe.com/fme/html/FME_Server_Documentation/Content/AdminGuide/Planning-Fault-Tolerance.htm

This is because the SMTP service was not designed to go through the load balancer, and consequently, a fault tolerant setting could cause duplicating or missing emails.

More Details:

In an FME Server fault tolerant setting we have the concept of a leader and follower core or “Engine Manager” (You can see this on the Deployment Status page) Only the leader core would have an active SMTP Publisher, the follower cores SMTP Publisher will not be running.

Workarounds:

1) The IMAP publisher was the intended publisher replacement on fault-tolerant architectures and provides a fault tolerant email publication.

2) If needed you can still use the SMTP service on the leader core and send emails their directly, but it would not be fault tolerant.

3) If you need a fault SMTP Publisher, then there is the possibility to configure a load balancer to ping both SMTP services to verify the active service and re-direct traffic to that SMTP server accordingly. However, this has not been tested and is not a confirmed method.

Discussion:

Hi all,

Knowing this limitation of FME server, I was suprised to see that I managed to send an email via an external action (SMTP) in an automation. I use FME server 2020.

So I get a bit confused here. Does this means that, on a fault tolerant installation :

1. sending an SMTP email via an external action in an automation of FME server will always work ?
2. sending an email using the SMTP publication service of the notification service of FME server will never work ?

Thanks in advance for the clarification,

Louis