Forum OpenACS Development: acs-mail-lite doesn't stop trying to send a bad email

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1: acs-mail-lite doesn't stop trying to send a bad email
Posted by Lars Pind on 12/26/02 12:57 PM
I've experienced a couple of times when acs-mail-lite couldn't send an email in its queue, in my cases, because the From address wasn't an email address, and thus my MTA refuses to send.

What happens in these situations is that the email stays in the queue, and acs-mail-lite keeps trying and trying and trying, and the reason I found out about is that the nightly logwatch email gets to be >600K.

I haven't looked at the code at all yet, I just wanted to point out the issue and hear if anyone's noticed, too, and perhaps has any thoughs, solutions, fix, patches?

Thanks,
/Lars

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2: Re: acs-mail-lite doesn't stop trying to send a bad email (response to 1)
Posted by Mat Kovach on 12/26/02 03:02 PM
What MTA are you using? acs-mail-lite is really just a queue wrapper around ns_sendmail (for the most part).  If acs-mail-lite can not send a message in to the queue is should be deleting it.  Of course, quite a bit of that depends on what error code your MTA is returning to ns_sendmail.

Mat

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3: Re: acs-mail-lite doesn't stop trying to send a bad email (response to 1)
Posted by Lars Pind on 12/26/02 06:36 PM
Sendmail.

The log message said Relaying Denied, but I haven't checked if the error message actually gets back to ns_sendmail. I assumed it would, since otherwise the message would've been considered successful and deleted anyway, no?

/Lars

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4: Re: acs-mail-lite doesn't stop trying to send a bad email (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on 12/26/02 07:39 PM
Yes, ns_sendmail should get that error message, which IIRC is code 505 or something like that.

Sounds like acs-mail-lite needs some clean-up, just like notifications needed clean-up.

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5: Re: acs-mail-lite doesn't stop trying to send a bad email (response to 4)
Posted by Mat Kovach on 12/26/02 08:23 PM
I think the real problem is in ns_sendmail.  acs-mail-lite does a if {[catch ns_sendmail .....  I don't think ns_sendmail handles it that way.

I'll take a look into it.

I've always had a problem with the ns_sendmail handles things (I have a modfidied ns_sendmail I use for uptime.openacs.org).  Maybe we should consider a ns_sendmail wrapper for OpenACS to handle mail sending and error handling correctly?

Mat

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6: Re: acs-mail-lite doesn't stop trying to send a bad email (response to 1)
Posted by Lars Pind on 12/27/02 09:50 AM
I was wrong. Here's the error:

gBQ00ZW14975: ruleset=check_mail, arg1=<Aldert>, relay=localhost [127.0.0.1], reject=553 5.5.4 <Aldert>... Domain name required for sender address Aldert

Looks like I'll have to investigate this further. Don't have time in the next couple days, though.

/Lars

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7: Re: acs-mail-lite doesn't stop trying to send a bad email (response to 1)
Posted by Reuven Lerner on 12/28/02 09:50 PM
AOLServer sends out odd-looking HELO statements to SMTP servers (e.g., "AOLServer?domain.com"), which might be causing problems.  I use qmail and haven't seen trouble with this, but I imagine that Sendmail might choke on it.

I also seem to recall seeing odd "From" addresses in the SMTP envelope from ns_sendmail.  I hope that I'm wrong, but it could be that Sendmail doesn't like something there.

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8: Re: acs-mail-lite doesn't stop trying to send a bad email (response to 1)
Posted by Kevin Dunlap on 01/01/03 07:00 PM
I am running Sendmail and I keep seeing the following message loged:
Jan  1 18:18:12 Wesley sendmail[43755]: h022ICfh043755: localhost [127.0.0.1] did not issue MAIL/EXPN/VRFY/ETRN during connection to MTA

Could these be related to the problem?

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9: Re: acs-mail-lite doesn't stop trying to send a bad email (response to 1)
Posted by Mark Aufflick on 01/02/03 04:15 AM
Hi all,

I cam across a Tcl email package which looks promising - maybe it could be used as the basis for acs-mail-lite instead of doing the hard work ourselves. You will find it at:

http://web.uvic.ca/~erempel/tcl/Email/Email.html

I found it while I was hunting for a Tcl module fo submitting http popst forms (i want to write a pl/tclu trigger that submits a form to send an sms when rows are inserted into a table)

Cheers, and happy new year everyone.