The mystery of the undelivered email notifications in Lotus Connections 3

We recently implemented Lotus Connections 3 for a client in Australia. The new installation manager process is a vast improvement over LC2.5 which was great. Everything worked smoothly however we soon noticed that email notification messages were not being sent in all cases that they should.

We spent quite a bit of time going thru the configuration etc to make sure the email notifications were all set correctly and we could not find any reason why they would not be sending. We tested with an alternate smtp server however it didn't make any different and for that matter there didn't seem to be any errors in the various logs. It was just like they didn't get sent.

When we installed we used the Medium size install option which resulted in the following:
LCCluster1 – Activities, Communities, Forums, Profiles
LCCluster2 – Blogs, Bookmarks, Files, Wikis
LCInfraCluster – Help, Homepage, News, Search

Now what we found was that Files, Wikis, Blogs, and Bookmarks were all sending notification emails correctly however Activities, Communities, Forums, Profiles were not. After much frustration we found that the message bus between the LCCluster1 and the LCInfraCluster didn't seem to be sening the messages, hence the News feature could not send the emails!

So we thought maybe it was a blocked message or something strange like that. The solution was to clear out the existing messages and restart the servers:

1. Stop all clusters
2. Delete all subdirectories under
d:\IBM\LotusConnections\data\shared\messageStores\
3. Delete all subdirectories user <WAS_HOME>\profiles\AppSrv01\tranlog
4. Restart all clusters

Bingo! Once we restarted all email notifications worked again. Note this is only any good if you don't mind loosing all the undelivered messages. Now we don't really know what blocked the message bus however once cleared it worked fine.