Mailout problems - needed babysitting - why?

[clarkac]

My client sent a mailing to over 4k contacts, with 'Forward Replies' and 'Track replies' checked.  Mailer Batch Limit was set to 120 per run, with 4 cron runs per hour.  After about 800 emails had been sent, emails stopped being sent and the mailing still showed as 'Running'.  In this period I got some messages as follows from cron - after a day I now have over 100 of these which seem to be the reply process crashing.

<br />
<b>Fatal error</b>:  Call to a member function __toString() on a non-object in <b>/home/rcadmino/public_html/sites/all/modules/civicrm/CRM/Mailing/Event/BAO/Reply.php</b> on line <b>140</b><br />

In order to complete the mailout I had to keep submitting the 'Send Scheduled Mailings' job until it was completed (maybe 15-20 submits).  I want to find out what went wrong and why the job wouldn't complete.  Where can I start to debug this?

[clarkac]

This problem seems to have messed up job scheduling as I notice that only 'Fetch Bounces' and 'Clean Up Temporary Data and Files' are now running and the rest of the jobs stopped at about the time the mailing problem occurred.  Any clues how to reset the background jobs schedule?  help!

[Donald Lobo]

the fatal error message gives you the exact line it is failing and why

if i had to guess, the mail parser fails to parse an email, civi code does not catch the error and bad things happen downstream, which results in the fatal, which aborts the entire job

lobo

[clarkac]

Lobo - you are exactly right - I just figured this out.  I deleted the contact that seemed to be causing the problems and now all the jobs are running.

[Donald Lobo]

would help a lot to figure out what went wrong and trap the error (and potentially return early) to avoid the fatal error

this will help other folks down the road a lot (since such issues are hard to reproduce and super hard to debug)

lobo

[clarkac]

Of course - but the necessity to get things rolling again sometimes overrides a real, proper fix.  But in this case I think the problem was the mailout sent an email to someone who has an automatic reply set up, and it appears it was crashing on the reply each time cron ran.  I could see the reply in the mailing report on each cron run.  I flagged the email address as 'on hold' but that didn't fix the problem, but deleting the contact did fix the problem.  Exactly why it crashed on the reply I don't know.   If there's anything I can do to help track this down, let me know.

[Donald Lobo]

You (or a developer friend) will need to debug the offending mail and see what happens

i.e. in a bad state, trace thru the code and see how it reacts to the mail and where the error is thrown that we fail to catch

lobo