E-mail and notifications

Which letters come and how to switch them off, a letter when a long job is done, the Portal Owner’s mail check.

The portal writes e-mails in three cases: service letters (invitation, password reset), notifications about events that everyone switches on and off in the profile, and a letter when a long job ends, if you asked for one when you started it. Letters come from contact@youedc.com in the language set in the recipient’s profile.

How a letter travels

An example from the demo data: Anna Smirnova accepted Tim’s invitation to the registry REG-DIAB-01. The letter is queued, so the button works at once even when the mail server is slow or down. A mail problem never cancels the action itself.

Which letters you can switch off

Open your Profile, section “E-mail notifications”, untick what you do not need and press “Save”. The change is written to the audit trail.

Portal Owners also see the “Administration” group. The password change letter cannot be switched off: it protects the account.

• My role or access in a project changed: a manager changed your role or sites, closed or restored your access;
• Someone accepted my invitation: the person you invited joined the project;
• My background job finished: decides whether the “E-mail me when it is done” box is ticked by default;
• for Portal Owners: a system job failed (for example, the nightly audit check found a broken chain) and a new user signed up (off by default).

Queries, SDV and other YouEDC Capture events will join this list when the EDC moves into the portal.

Below, under “News and reminders”, there are two separate boxes: “Send me YouEDC news and reminders” (at most once a week) and “Letters about updates” (once a week, on Monday morning, see What’s new). Both stay off until you switch them on.

A letter when a long job is done

Long jobs can run in the background: the server works while you do other things. Tick “E-mail me when it is done”, and a letter with a link to the result arrives when it ends. If the job fails, the letter comes too, with the reason.

A CDISC build in YouEDC Studio: on the “Datasets and files” tab press “Build in the background”. While it runs, the study page shows “The study is being built in the background”.

All your background jobs are in Profile > My background jobs: state, outcome, link to the result and files. Files are kept for 7 days and only their author sees and downloads them.

For now the CDISC build and the Portal Owner’s system jobs can run in the background. The other YouEDC Studio tools answer within seconds, so no letter is needed there. YouEDC Capture exports get the same box when the EDC moves in.

Checking the mail (for Portal Owners)

At any moment open Administration > Mail:

1. “Check the connection”: the portal signs in to the mail server and sends nothing;
2. “Send a test letter”: a real letter to any address right away, without the queue;
3. if something is wrong, you see the reason in plain words and what to do, with the technical text of the error below.

At the top, counters for 7 days: sent, waiting, being retried and failed. On the right, the settings from .env: the password is never shown, only “set” or “not set”.

Further down are the last letters: to whom, subject, state and error. The text of letters is not shown: it may hold sign-in links. When letters failed after all attempts, a “Send again” button appears. Every check is written to the portal audit.

Every letter goes out branded and as plain text for mail apps that do not show formatting. See how they look in each language on Administration > Mail > How the letters look; any sample can be sent to yourself.

Set-up (for the server admin)

Mail settings live in the .env file on the server: EMAIL_HOST, EMAIL_PORT, EMAIL_SSL, EMAIL_USER, EMAIL_FROM. The password is set only with deploy/set_mail_password.sh and is never kept in git, files or chats. You can also check the mail on the server, from the installation folder: docker compose exec yp_app flask --app wsgi send-test-email your@address. It sends a letter at once and says why, if it fails. Without mail the portal still works: invitation and password reset links are shown on screen.