Alarm Email from Red Lion CR3000 HMI

[Bullzi]

Hi everyone,
I have a Red Lion CR3000 HMI that I am trying to set up to send a email when there are certain alarms. So far I have had no luck getting an email at all.



I have tried 3 different email servers, one for the company, Gmail with the Red Lion test account and Yahoo using my personal account. Nothing.


I am pretty confident that I have everything set up properly. See the attached snip.


Any ideas on what could be holding me up? Thanks for any help you can provide.

 

[seth350]

If the HMI doesn’t have access to a DNS server, the panel won’t be able to lookup the mail server from the host name.

Try pinging your mail servers by host name and see if you get a reply. If not, go to a computer that would have access to a DNS server and ping them there. It should return an IP address as well.

Take the IP address and put it into your HMI and see if it works then. IP addresses don’t need no stinkin DNS server.

 

[Dryhops]

What does the log file contain? It should contain any failed requests to the server. +1 for the DNS, most of our systems do not specify them as all traffic is internal and we don't use any domains locally.

 

[padees]

Cant comment on DNS...

July 2018 I did play with this a bit with a G306 in 3.0 and a G07 in 3.0 and 3.1. Both email and text messages.

Just to cover bases:
You enabled mail manager and set up a contact list. (see pics)
You have a reverse path set that matches the email address in the SMTP authentication.
You set up your alarm with a recipient to receive the email, and or, text.

I bleeped out actual email and cell numbers in this because they are real people.

I did try this with Outlook mail from work. GMX, AOL, Yahoo and Gmail.

What worked the best, 100% of the time was gmail, but you have to config to allow for less security and it will constantly remind you of this. Usually you got a text and/or email within a few seconds. Yahoo did work, but latency was around 22 minutes on average. Outlook and GMX were sporadic and may not even get anything. AOL, tried that once and it worked. Changed GMX to IP address and that did move everything, but it was really slow.

Not sure if any of this will help you, just my experience.

 

[padees]

Another thing I was interested in is how the text messages were grouped.

The 3 carriers involved were AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, as that's what these guys have.

I have AT&T, and every text was a separate message, not grouped into one thread. Both Verizon and Sprint grouped everything nicely into one text thread from the Red Lion panels. In my opinion, Verizon did the best job on how the text messages were displayed/grouped and not as cryptic (if I can use that).

I sure don't want my cell phone bombed with texts from one of these. Hit the e-stop button 30 times in the test, you get 60 different text messages you have to delete. LOL

 

[Bullzi]

Thank for the help everyone. I have tried all the suggestions with no luck. I am not getting a log file generated, according to the manual that means I am not getting to the mail server at all. So I at a little bit of a loss. I am working with the IT person. Maybe he has something set up in the router that is keeping me from getting out.


I will keep trying and post back if I get anywhere.

 

[Bullzi]

Here is an update after 1 year of messing with this:

Not long after my last post I finally got Gmail to work with the help of the customers IT Person. There were some settings on the Google side that he had me manipulate and wallah it worked. I was a happy man for about 3-4 Months. After that time Gmail stopped working. No matter what I did I couldn't make it work. It simply would not let the HMI send an alarm email. Nothing changed in the HMI and I made no changes in the setup of the email server.

So the IT Guy set up another Gmail account and that one also worked just fine for about 3-4 Months, it stopped sending alarms about 1-2 Months ago.

So he set up something with smtp2go.com. We have since tried about everything we can think of and we cant get this to work. The IT guy I am working with is one of the most competent IT people I have worked with so I am pretty sure he knows what he is doing.


What are we missing? Has anyone been able to make a Red Lion Device email with any long term success? Getting extremely frustrated here so any help you can provide would be extremely valuable.
Thanks!!

 

[woolie161]

Hello Bullzi,
I have had success with the old G3 screens and even the new CR3 screens.
Each time I have set up emailing, the client has provided an email address that is configured on their server. i.e [email protected] where xxx is the company domain name. Only problem I have had was when their server was updated and IT didn't recognise the email address' so they were deleted. Once restored, things continued to work.

 

[OkiePC]

We set up an account with AuthSMTP. I emailed them to inquire about getting a static IP address assigned to our account and they responded within a day or two and gave me the IP address. I use my login and credentials for the AuthSMTP account on the Crimson Mail Manager Settings.

I also tried to use a "Fixed Name" for the mail server and could never get that to work. Probably something to do with DNS lookup/gateway address not letting the requests get out and back in correctly. I didn't try too hard before settling on using a Fixed IP which always seems to work.

I could have made the IP address a tag that could be edited on the HMI, but for five years so far that IP address has been consistent.

I don't think the reverse path text matters. I put something meaningful to each site in there so that it shows up in the subject of the message.

There are more pieces to this I can share if you want to use email to SMS gateways so that instead of email alerts, you can send text messages.

I set these up so that the end user can enable and disable alerts for each recipient and edit each user email address at runtime. I think I posted a shell program a while back that has those pieces done for you.

EDIT: Here is a link to the thread where I first set this up to make the recipients dynamic (edit on the screen at runtime):
http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?t=113460&highlight=email

The last post has the cd3 file attached. Since then, I have made a tweak or two here and there, but should be helpful. You can import this into an instance of Crimson 3.1 and drag and drop pieces (tags, programs, HMI elements) as needed into your Crimson instance.