Tag: Email

Client certificate error with Office 365 and Blackberry Hub

Our office recently implemented two-factor authentication with Office 365 and it caused some issues with my Activesync account in Blackberry Hub (running on my Android Pixel 2. I would receive email intermittently – an hour on, a few hours off, and then a random bunch of email again. Then I started receiving the following error message:

The client certificate for (your mail account) must be allowed for use in establishing secure email connections. Do you want to do this now? [Password may or may not be required.]

Before the two-factor change, out email configuration required that we user a client certificate that was issued to our phone through Microsoft Intune (called “Company Portal” on our phones). Once two-factor was enabled, leaving the certificate selected gave that error message. Instead, email needed to have the certificate removed as follows:

Here was the big change: instead of my domain password, Hub required me to generate an app-specific password using the following process:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/create-an-app-password-for-office-365-3e7c860f-bda4-4441-a618-b53953ee1183

The mobile version of office.com doesn’t allow you to generate an app password, but you can tell the Chrome on your phone to view the full desktop version of the site and it will allow you to generate a password. Copy it, use it in Blackberry Hub (without the certificate selected), and you’re back to receiving your email!

Error creating emailed report subscriptions in Sharepoint-integrated SSRS

Anybody who has the rights to run a report in SSRS can set up a subscription, delivering the report to their own email address. However, if you try to deliver the report as an email to somebody else, you might be greeted with this unclear error message:
Reporting Services - other users email address
It reads:

A subscription delivery error has occurred. (rsDeliveryError)
One of the extension parameters is not valid for the
following reason: The account you are using does not
have administrator privileges. A subscription cannot
be created for bob.thompson@mydomain.com.
(rsInvalidExtensionParameter)

I was setting up a subscription in our Sharepoint-integrated SQL Reporting Services site, and was attending to send the report to our shared group email address. I could set it up to deliver to me and I could forward it, but it wasn’t letting me send the email to anybody else’s email address, either inside or outside the organization.

Solution: Grant your user “Create Alerts” and “Manage Alerts” permission

I received this error because I lacked the “Create Alerts” and “Manage Alerts” on the report in question (or folder, or higher up). The error says you need to be an administrator, but doesn’t really tell you what’s wrong with your request – it’s really complaining that you’re delivering an alert to somebody else. Granting those rights to your user account (for that report, or to an object above it so they propagate down to that report) allows you to send the report to any email address you want.

I hope this helps!

Receiving (or stopping!) SQL Server maintenance plan summary emails

When you use the Maintenance Plan wizard in SQL Management Studio to set up a new plan, you have the option to have the SQL Agent send you a plan execution summary email:

It’s a pretty handy email – not just a success/failure on the SQL Agent job, but details about the actual maintenance plan steps and which ones ran and for how long. The problem we ran into was how to actually turn this email off once it was initially enabled in the wizard! It’s not anywhere in the SQL Agent job or in the properties of the maintenance plan, or even anywhere obvious in the maintenance plan designer. It’s hidden in a tiny button on the toolbar in the designer called “Reporting and Logging”:

Clicking there gets you some logging options, including sending a summary email to an operator:

From there, you can change the operator or stop the email summary (or start it, if that’s what you’re looking for).

Export from SQL Server to XLS and email results

Sometimes you want to take some query results and export them directly to an XLS file – here’s how you can set that up in SQL Server. The biggest caveat is that you need to run it from an x86 instance of SQL Server – the x64 instance won’t have access to the Jet driver needed to write the Excel file (Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0), where the x86 version will. In fact, we maintain an older x86 instance of SQL Server for random processes like this that need it – x64 is better in almost every case, but we can’t see to completely ditch x86… 🙂

I use a stored proc that I call from a SQL Agent Job, which works great. The actual process is a bit awkward – for starters, you’ll need access to xp_cmdshell. SQL Server can’t create a new Excel file from scratch, so you have to keep a blank Excel file around, make a copy of it, and then insert into the copy to get your final result.

That said, here’s the code to generate the XLS file from your query results:

SELECT Column1, Column2, Column3, Column4
  INTO ##YourTempTable
  FROM SomeOtherTable

SET @Folder = 'C:\Temp\'
SET @DocumentBlank = 'Your Document - Blank'
SET @DocumentLong = 'Your Document - ' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(10), GETDATE(), 120)

DECLARE @CMD NVARCHAR(4000)
SET @CMD = 'COPY "' + @folder + @DocumentBlank + '.xls" "' + @Folder + @DocumentLong + '.xls"'
exec master..xp_cmdshell @CMD

-- Export the Excel sheet
SET @CMD = 'insert into OPENROWSET(''Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0'',
	''Excel 8.0;Database=' + @Folder + @DocumentLong + '.xls;'',
	''SELECT * FROM [Sheet1$]'')
	select Column1, Column2, Column3, Column4 from ##YourTempTable'

exec sp_executesql @CMD

Once that’s exported, you can just set up the email process using sp_send_dbmail and attach the file you just generated:

DECLARE @Body VARCHAR(2000)

SET @Attachments = @Folder + @DocumentLong  + '.xls'
SET @Body = 'Your file has been generated for ' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(10), GETDATE(), 120)

exec msdb..sp_send_dbmail @profile_name = 'YourMailProfile',
	@Recipients = 'Recipients@YourDomain.biz',
	@subject = 'Your file is ready',
	@Body = @Body,
	@file_attachments = @DocumentLong