Not receiving email notifications when primary gateway goes down

[rtadams89]

I have two wan links, setup in an active passive fashion by making one a Tier 1 in the gateway group and the other a Tier 5. The defautl gateway is set to be the gateway group.
When the primary WAN link actually goes down, I do not get an email alert about it and see this in the logs:
notify_monitor.php: Could not send the message to <my email> -- Error: Failed to connect to <my smtp server>

If I just mark the primary WAN as offline, I do get an email alert.

When the primary WAN is offline (either because I have marked it as down, or because it actually is down) I get an error when testing the system notifications.

To me, this seems to indicate pfsense is not using the default gateway, but instead continues to try to send the email notifications out the primary WAN link. Why is this and how do I change this behavior?

[rtadams89]

I finally had a chance to get to the network and do a packet capture while unplugging the primary WAN link. Capture on primary WAN interface shows the tcp syn packets going out the interface bound for the SMTP server, with obviously no response. I then tried to do a capture on the secondary interface while repeating the test and the webconfigurator froze up. I power cycled the pfsense box, and after it rebooted, I am unable to reproduce the issue and the alerts now work as expected. I got a second capture and show the connection to the SMTP server leaving from the secondary interface as expected when the primary interface is down. So.... not sure where that leaves me; the pfsense default behavior is clearly right, and my configuration also seems to be right, but something non-persistent was causing this traffic to route out the gateway interface that was down...