After we ported our solution to a new environment, we noticed no e-mail notifications were coming from its process instances.

 I checked the Workspace for errors and found this hint:

There is no connection string for the destination e-mail address (followed by the e-mail address).

I scoured the Management Console in the K2 Workspace to compare string table values between the two environments. All matched perfectly.

My next step was to fire up SQL Server Management Studio.

[HostServer].[Configuration]

The [HostServer].[Configuration] table holds all of the configuration values for the blackpearl environment. It contains three columns: ConfigID, which holds a GUID, VariableToken, which holds a description, and VariableValue, which holds the actual value.

A comparison of the two databases revealed the problem right away: the [SMTPCONNECTIONSTRING] and [SMTPCONNECTIONSTRINGANONYMOUS] values contain an invalid host name in the new environment. It appeared as though the administrator wasn’t aware there were more characters present than what was shown in the textbox, and some of the characters were inadvertently repeated (totally my guess).

In my view, the preferred method of correcting this is to re-run the K2 blackpearl setup program on the new server and correct the value that way.

But fixing the problem wasn’t really the point of this post — it was to simply offer awareness of a tool you might consider using in case you’re facing a similar problem.