460794 - Received ap_content_length_filter errors on Sendmail failure

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Bugzilla :: Email Notifications, defect)

Description

[miketosh]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3
Build Identifier: Bugzilla 3.0.3

Sendmail could not contact remote RELAY host.  It instead returned an error code and did not send the emails.

Apache reported ap_content_length_filter (ap_read_bucket failed) errors to log during email submissions and stopped processing request.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Set up sendmail with remote smartrelay that doesn't exist
2. configure bugzilla to use sendmail and 'sendmailnow'
3. bring up a list of 2+ bugs
4. make a change to all of them (comment or otherwise)
Actual Results:  
Bugzilla processes the change to the first bug, attempts to send mail and fails.

The rest of the bugs do not receive the comment or change and no email is attempted for them.

At this point Users cannot open new bugs or make changes to existing bugs.  Emails at this point will most likely never get sent, and there could be database inconsistencies.

Expected Results:  
Bugzilla should have warned that emails could not have been sent instead of failing on submission.

This looks like a case where Bugzilla should either address the DeliveryMethod or the ErrorMode for Sendmail MTA.

I suggest the ErrorMode (-N 'never')

http://mxr.mozilla.org/bugzilla3.0/source/Bugzilla/Mailer.pm#85

Comment 1

[Frédéric Buclin]

(In reply to comment #0)
> 1. Set up sendmail with remote smartrelay that doesn't exist

That's the admin's responsibility to correctly configure his MTA. Now that we use DB transactions, the DB shouldn't be in an inconsistent state.

I would tend to say it's a good thing that Bugzilla refuses to proceed other bugs, as you could do changes which wouldn't be notified otherwise. Not a severe problem.

Comment 2

[miketosh]

(In reply to comment #1)
> (In reply to comment #0)
> > 1. Set up sendmail with remote smartrelay that doesn't exist
> 
> That's the admin's responsibility to correctly configure his MTA. Now that we
> use DB transactions, the DB shouldn't be in an inconsistent state.

That was just for recreating.  I guess the smarthost needs to be defined, but just can't respond to the local sendmail requests.

My problem happened when the remote relay went down causing a Bugzilla outage for a few days until it could be restored.  My MTA was configured properly, it just couldn't send out any new emails and returned with an error code that Bugzilla or the Email::Send::Sendmail package couldn't handle.

Comment 3

[Frédéric Buclin]

dupe of bug 87801?

Comment 4

[miketosh]

Not really.  Bugzilla just timed out for me, it didn't provide any error message.

Comment 5

[Frédéric Buclin]

This bug doesn't fall into the definition of a major bug.

Comment 6

[Frédéric Buclin]

With jobqueue, emails are queued and do not block bug editing anymore. I'm going to close this bug as there is nothing we can really do here. Ignoring unsent bugmails is not an option.