Outlook VBO send email causes warning

[john.schreier]

We routinely have processes freeze during the MS Outlook Email VBO send email action. They'll stay on that step, in the warning stage, until someone requests an immediate stop because the action won't fail. This will persist for hours until someone sees the warning alert and stops it.

Is there a way to:

• prevent this from happening entirely?
• or have some kind of timeout error on this action?
• or flag it as an exception after a certain length of time so the process can move on to the next item?

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John Schreier
RPA developer
United States
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[LeonardoSQueiroz]

Hello,

Apparently it's not possible natively, I did some research and found some related articles that could help with the investigation, I hope it helps you:

• https://community.blueprism.com/communities/community-home/digestviewer/viewthread?GroupId=145&MessageKey=0029694a-703c-45a5-a9ad-7d31ebc40dcd&CommunityKey=3743dbaa-6766-4a4d-b7ed-9a98b6b1dd0 1?utm_source=blueprism&utm_medium=pweb&utm_campaign= gl-web-2022-q1-12-3-community-related-discussions
• https://community.bluueprism.com/communities/community-home/digstViewer/ViewThread?groupid=145&messagekey=2b3084be-731c-4CC6-8E47-085A5E23f9&communitykey=3743dba-676-4d-b-4d 7ed-9a98b6b1dd01
• https://community.blueprism.com/discussion/outlook-vbo-send-email-causes-warning?ReturnUrl=%2fcontent%2fallrecentposts

Regards

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Leonardo Soares
RPA Developer Tech Leader
Bridge Consulting
América/Brazil
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[john.schreier]

Thank you for your help, Leonardo. I hadn't seen the first article in my search of the Community website, but that would be exactly what I'd need, if it existed.

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John Schreier
RPA developer
United States
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[michaeloneil]

Hi @John Schreier

I would say the best option is to try and identify why this is happening when you run the send emails action. Are there any pop ups or messages showing on outlook on the resource machine? Is the outlook application definitely launched correctly on the machine. As an alternative try using SMTP send email action as this is generally more reliable than outlook for sending emails and should resolve the issue you are having.

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Michael ONeil
Technical Lead developer
NTTData
Europe/London
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[john.schreier]

Hi, Michael:

When I logged into the resource PC, I didn't see any errors or anything out of the ordinary. The process was at exactly the stage where it was supposed to have been when the email was sent. What makes this more confounding is that it completed several loops earlier in the same run, which included sending several emails with the same format (blank body, PDF attachment downloaded earlier in the loop, etc.) that completed successfully.

There's seemingly no rhyme or reason to the warning, and there's not a practical way to force an exception on the Microsoft VBOs after a certain length of time that will allow the process to continue running after flagging the problem email.

I should also add that it isn't confined to just one resource PC or process; the send email action freezes and creates warnings at entirely random intervals.

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John Schreier
RPA developer
United States
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[michaeloneil]

If you are using a loop to send multiple emails with attachments your automation could be moving a bit too fast for outlook to keep up with the send requests. Have you tried adding a wait stage before or after each send email action?

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Michael ONeil
Technical Lead developer
NTTData
Europe/London
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[john.schreier]

Thanks for the response, Michael -- on the two processes where I'm having this problem of the Outlook VBO freezing, one has about a combined 20-30 seconds of wait stages for the other actions occurring on each iteration before the email is sent. The other doesn't even use Outlook except to send a status report email at the end.

Meanwhile, I have another process that sends out seven update emails every two hours that runs without a hitch, so who knows?

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John Schreier
RPA developer
United States
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[LeonardoSQueiroz]

Hello,

One solution would be to check which step of the vbo code where the freezing is occurring through code variables, but this is a solution that would take time and be tiring as the occurrence varies.

The fact that body/attachments are the same and have success and failure events makes the analysis even more difficult.

Following Michael's initial suggestion of using SMTP, I believe it solves the problem, is this viable within the scope of your project? I believe it would also be interesting to open a ticket with support.

Regards,

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Leonardo Soares
RPA Developer Tech Leader
Bridge Consulting
América/Brazil
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[john.schreier]

Thanks for that suggestion, Leonardo -- I hadn't considered going through the code to troubleshoot. I also have a ticket in, so we'll see where that goes.

Lastly, if this persists, I'm considering changing just that process to use the Graph API to send emails. On our previous RPA software, we had to read inboxes using Graph API. It's not ideal, but it appears Blue Prism has good documentation out there for it.

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John Schreier
RPA developer
United States
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