87801 - Better error messages when mail sending fails

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Bugzilla :: Email Notifications, defect, P1)

Description

[Paul Thomas]

Someone here was using Bugzilla and had forgotten their password.
They filled in their e-mail address and clicked on "E-mail me a password".

The webpage returned back said

"Password has been emailed
No recipient addresses found in header The password for the e-mail address 
[e-mail] has been e-mailed to that address."

They never got an email!

I looked into it and it turned out that parameter passwordmail has accidently 
been saved with an extra newline in the email address and looked like this

From: bu
[e-mail]
To: %mailaddress%
Subject: Your Bugzilla password.
... etc ...

I took out the newline, saved the new parameter and it worked fine.

I reckon that the message "No recipient addresses found in header" was returned 
from sendmail, yet "The password for the e-mail address [e-mail] has 
been e-mailed to that address" was displayed, so it looks to me as if the 
return code from the call the sendmail is not been checked properly.

Although this bug only reveals itself when the system is not set up properly, I 
still reckon that any "dodgy" return code checking from sendmail is worth 
reporting.

Comment 1

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

grr, dependency in wrong order...

Comment 2

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

Mass moving to new product Bugzilla...

Comment 3

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

We are currently trying to wrap up Bugzilla 2.16.  We are now close enough to
release time that anything that wasn't already ranked at P1 isn't going to make
the cut.  Thus this is being retargetted at 2.18.  If you strongly disagree with
this retargetting, please comment, however, be aware that we only have about 2
weeks left to review and test anything at this point, and we intend to devote
this time to the remaining bugs that were designated as release blockers.

Comment 4

[Christian Reis]

Actually, this is a quite common problem with prefs being saved with a newline
at the end; I think this was recently fixed but can't be bothered to find the
bug # right now.

I agree that mail error checking would be nice; do you have a proposal of what
exactly should happen? My idea:

Bug 59351 calls for centralizing sendmail calls, which is great. Have the
MailMessage function return a non-zero status and log a message (hmmm, do we
have a log?) explaining what went wrong. Clients of MailMessage() can check the
status and print a message like:

"Bugzilla failed to send email to $recipient. This probably means the system has
a configuration problem. Please contact $maintainer and let him know of the
problem."

Comment 5

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Changing default owner of Email Notifications component to JayPee, a.k.a.
J. Paul Reed ([e-mail]).  Jake will be offline for a few months.

Comment 6

[Joel Peshkin]

These unloved bugs have been sitting untouched since June 2002 or longer.  If
nobody does anything else to them, they certainly won't make 2.18
Retargetting to 2.20.  If you really plan to push them right now, you might pull
them back in.

Comment 7

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

If bug 49893 is fixed, this becomes a wontfix, because the problem will no
longer be there to fix (at least not in this form).

Comment 8

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

As preed is no longer actively working on Bugzilla (from what I know), I somehow
doubt that this bug will make it in for 2.20. :-) If I'm wrong, feel free to
take it back and re-target it. :-)

Comment 9

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

Okay. So bug 49893 didn't obsolete this. Now we just need to actually handle errors of *all* the Mail::Mailer failures, and print something sensible out when they fail.

Comment 10

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

*** Bug 328808 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

*** Bug 312477 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

*** Bug 339093 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 13

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

For anybody who comes here, note that "undef error" in CGI.pm means that your mail server for SMTP is set incorrectly, or is rejecting your connections. That's the very first error that we should make better.

Comment 14

[Frédéric Buclin]

The Bugzilla 3.0 branch is now locked to security bugs and dataloss fixes only. This bug doesn't fit into one of these two categories and is retargetted to 3.2 as part of a mass-change. To catch bugmails related to this mass-change, use lts081207 in your email client filter.

Comment 15

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

This was fixed in Bugzilla 3.0 by switching to the Email:: modules, which give actually decent errors, and also by adding smtp_debug, which allows you to see what's really going on for SMTP servers.