The e-mail in the system is used for registration, password changes, alerts, warnings, errors and reports. Some of these may or may not be activated.
The system sends e-mail only from its application server/s, and it uses SMTP to send e-mail via your Corporate SMTP (Exchange Server). This is done via SMTP on TCP Port 25 (Standard).
The system servers require a domain user (DOMAIN\INpensions) and password with a valid mailbox on your Exchange servers, so that it can send e-mail via your servers. Another requirement is for the Corporate Exchange server/s to allow the system servers to relay through them. This is done in order for the system to send e-mail to the members and outside clients. If relaying is not enabled, the system can only send internal e-mail, and no member would be informed of their successful registration, password changes, and they would not be able to receive reports.
Reports are usually either exported as CSV (Excel) or PDF. The CSV files are first zipped (Winzip) on the application server before they are emailed. A very important thing to remember is the size of the reports and the restrictions on the Exchange servers. Some Clients don't allow big attachments to come through during the day, so it is possible that a report may be exported, zipped and then e-mailed, but that the user would only receive it that night or the following morning. Very large reports in the order of 9 GB and larger, which would compress to around 50 MB, may fail depending on the Exchange server settings for the system mailbox user.
Note
What must be realized is that copying just one 50MB file across the WAN can take 20 - 30 minutes. This can totally swamp the WAN bandwidth and slow down all operations for all the other users. If you thus export and copy or e-mail 5 - 10 of these reports a day, then this may also account for some network performance problems.