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Qualtrics SMTP email failing
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Description

Qualtrics, a survey software we use, has a setup for SMTP relay which allows us to schedule and send survey emails to research participants from a wikimedia.org email (surveys@ or qualtrics@). It was last successfully used in June 2024, and is currently not working. We'd like to fix this so we can use the email feature for an upcoming Design Research survey (scheduled ~August 13th) that requires a bit of complex emailing (daily unique links sent to a group of diary study participants).

The error message received was EQD19: "Qualtrics was unable to connect to your organization’s email server. This is likely because you have not set up your SMTP relay correctly, or the server you’ve established an SMTP relay with is down. Contact your organization’s IT team."

Event Timeline

@TAndic I ran an initial test and our setup appears to be working correctly. Could we perhaps jump on a call and review the configuration together and send some test emails?

Change #1174741 had a related patch set uploaded (by JHathaway; author: JHathaway):

[operations/puppet@production] postfix: allow sasl auth clients to use non-FQDN in helo

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1174741

Change #1174741 merged by JHathaway:

[operations/puppet@production] postfix: allow sasl auth clients to use non-FQDN in helo

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1174741

It appears there were two issues:

#. Our mail server hostname changed from mx1001.wikimedia.org to mx-out1001.wikimedia.org, which needed to be updated in the Qualtrics config.

#. Qualtrics does not send an FQDN in its HELO SMTP command. So we added a patch to skip HELO checking for SASL authenticated clients.