TFS 2017 - Duplicate Email notifications

Question

Using TFS 2017 Update 2, we notice that we sometimes get some email notification double, with a lot of time (30 minutes) between them.

We are not using distributions lists, users are added to TFS Teams directly.

When checking the View link in the bottom, its shows the same ID for all duplicate emails, so its the same alert triggering it.

A concrete example Build completed at 11:18 AM. We received an identical notification at 11:37, 11:53 and 12:09. First issue is already that there is 20 minutes between the completion of the build and the sent of the first message.

What part of TFS should i troubleshoot here, we have noticed before that email alerts are received later then expected.

So we have 2 issues, which might be related 1. Emails arrive up to 30 minutes later than expected 2. Identical Emails sometimes are received 2/3 times.

Update, issue came back. Technical Details: Build Ran for 15.3 minutes (Default), completed at Fri 12/01/2017 01:48 PM

1st email header: Received: from TFSAPPSERVER (ip) by smtphost.domain.com (ip address) with Microsoft SMTP Server id 14.3.319.2; Fri, 1 Dec 2017 07:50:34 -0600 ( 01:50 PM tranlated to same time above)

2nd email header: Received: from TFSAPPSERVER (ip) by smtphost.domain.com (ip address) with Microsoft SMTP Server id 14.3.319.2; Fri, 1 Dec 2017 08:26:37 -0600 ( 02:26 PM tranlated to same time above)

What happens when you test the Email Alert Settings through the Team Foundation Server Administration Console on the app instance? — Tore Østergaard
At this moment a single message is received, i will try again at a more busyer time. i have the feeling it has something that happens at peak times. — Nico
Im not able to reproduce this using the test message, i received 1 duplicate this morning. Could this be related to a retry system TFS is doing if something fails and tries again later ? This morning the messages came in 30 minutes apart. The first message came in 20 minutes after the built completed. — Nico
@Nico Does this issue occur for all the users? Do you have set certain rules on email server/client? Also check if there are any network issues that cause mail stops being sent and are added to the Mail Queue. — Andy Li-MSFT
It is confirmed for multiple users. What would be the best way in TFS to confirm if its beeing processed by TFS multiple times ? — Nico

Shayki Abramczyk Shayki Abramczyk · Accepted Answer · 2018-10-22T08:57:49

In this thread there is a solution from Microsoft:

The root of our issue was that the SMTP server was not responding to TFS to indicate that the mail was sent within the timeout period. Thus the fix in our case was simply to increase the timeout that TFS waits before re-sending emails.

To do this, we ran the following in the TFS Configuration database to change the timeout from 10 seconds (the default) to 90 seconds:

exec prc_SetRegistryValue 1, '#\Service\Integration\Settings\SendTimeout\', 90000

TFS 2017 - Duplicate Email notifications

1 Answers