[Building Sakai] Sakai 2.9.0rc3 questions about email notification

[Axel Theorin]

Hi!

I have just successfully built and installed Sakai 2.9.0rc3 but I have
run into some problems with the email notification service.

1. No email notification is sent when I register new users even though
I have explicitly  set " notifyNewUserEmail=true " in sakai.properties
and there is a default locale email template defined for the key
sitemanage.notifyNewUserEmail.
There is no email-related activity logged in catalina.out that
suggests that there was a any failed attempt to send an email. It
seems the system just ignores the new-user event.

2. When a user creates a site, an email is sent to the administrator
email address, but the logs show the following warning:
"""
 WARN ajp-bio-8009-exec-6
org.sakaiproject.entitybroker.providers.UserEntityProvider - Could not
find user with eid=872b32c5-755d-4b69-bdc5-c6559d02b270 (attempting
check using user id=872b32c5-755d-4b69-bdc5-c6559d02b270) :: null
"""
Also, not all of the keys used in the template (default
sitemanage.notifySiteCreation template) are substituted with the
relevant information, and the site name (which is in japanese) appears
to have been url-encoded and therefore unreadable (sample notification
email below)
"""
(no subject)
Site Created by Axel Theorin
MIME-Version: 1.0
Precedence: bulk
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

=20
>From Worksite Setup to ejapanology.tufs.ac.jp Support:
       =20
Site  e-Japanology=E4=BC=81=E7=94=BB=E6=83=85=E5=A0=B1=E5=85=B1=E6=9C=89 (i=
d 6b21c665-6f16-4653-ad1e-472c93c06fae) was set up by Axel Theorin (axelt, =
email axel.theorin at gmail.com) on 2012-11-08 09:53:35=20
"""

However, adding a participant to a site results in a notification
according to the sitemange.notifyAddedParticipant template being sent
without errors. All fields are filled in and japanese text is not
garbled.

Any suggestions or pointers on how I should go about troubleshooting
and solving these problems would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,
Axel Theorin
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies