Sendmail or PEAR error with 3.1.4 and 3.1.5 (worked fine in 3.1.3)

[Steve Baker]

Hello again!

I'm encountering sendmail problems when sending a mailing with 3.1.4 and 3.1.5 and was looking for some ideas.  The problem did not happen with 3.1.3 and started with 3.1.4 (so I rolled back to 3.1.3).  Today I upgraded from 3.1.3 to 3.1.5 and the sendmail problem returned... so I rolled back to 3.1.3 again and the problem went away.

I am running CiviCRM in a Drupal 6.16 configuration on Apache through 1&1 Hosting, with MySQL v5.0.81 and PHP v5.2.13.  I have made no other changes to the system and all of my other Drupal modules are up-to-date.

I begin by creating a new mailing and follow the wizard steps all the way to the step when it offers to send a test message.  Here's the text from the error message when I send a test message before submitting a mailing into the queue.

Code: [Select]

Sorry. A non-recoverable error has occurred.
sendmail returned error code 1

Return to home page.

Error Details:

Array
(
    [callback] => Array
        (
            [0] => CRM_Core_Error
            [1] => handle
        )
    {code} => 1               // Changed from [ ] to { } for this post
    [message] => sendmail returned error code 1
    [mode] => 16
    [debug_info] =>
    [type] => PEAR_Error
    [user_info] =>
    [to_string] => [pear_error: message="sendmail returned error code 1" code=1 mode=callback callback=CRM_Core_Error::handle prefix="" info=""]
)

Ideas on how I can help?  Should I try something in particular to diagnose the problem?  I figure there's something that was introduced in 3.1.4 and carried into 3.1.5 that made the difference, as my mailings work great with 3.1.3.

Again, thanks for a terrific system and I look forward to helping however I am able.

Cheers,
Steve

[Kiran Jagtap]

1. Could you please configure Outbound Email = SMTP from global setting, and check.

2. Also could you check for same group/email address for "Send Email to Contacts" feature and check.

Let us know result for these two.

thanks

kiran

[Steve Baker]

Hello again!

Thanks for the ideas.  I appreciate your time and I hope the following helps you to diagnose the problem and potentially identify a solution or work-around.  Here's a quick replay of the actions that I performed this morning.

1. Reinstalled the 3.1.5 codebase and changed the outbound email setting from Sendmail to SMTP.  I received the test email and feel pretty good that SMTP is working.

2. Created a new mailing and proceeded through the steps to Step 4 -- Test (step 4 of 5).  In the "Test Mailing" section I entered my personal email address and did not select a group, clicked the "Send a Test Mailing" button, and received a different error message (see below, code block 1).

3. Switched back to Sendmail instead of SMTP and received the test email from that configuration, so again I'm feeling like the system is able to communicate via email alright.

4. Created a new mailing and proceeded through the steps to Step 4, and again used my email address in the "Send to This Address" box (no group selected).  When I sent this test message, I received the same error message that I reported yesterday (see below, code block 2).

5. Reinstalled CiviCRM 3.1.3 instead of 3.1.5, ensured my settings were alright (specifically using Sendmail instead of SMTP as this is what has always worked for me in the past).

6. Created a new mailing and proceeded through the steps to Step 4, and again used my email address in the "Send to This Address" box (no group selected).  This time the message went out perfectly and all appears to be well.

A quick note about the mailing, although it might not matter to these diagnostics -- it was a simple one-liner message with the necessary tokens for opt-out, etc. and nothing other than "Hello World."

Continuing the story...

7. Reinstalled 3.1.5 instead of 3.1.3 (I'm getting pretty good at this!) and ensured that my Sendmail settings were intact.

8. Used the "Send Email to Contacts" feature.  I used the Search functionality to find a group of people and send them a message.  Hooray, it worked!  The test message went out to all of the folks, using Sendmail with the 3.1.5 codebase.

9. Switched from Sendmail to SMTP, still using 3.1.5 -- proceeded with the same "Send Email to Contacts" feature (searched, selected, and sent).  The test message went out to all of the folks, using SMTP with the 3.1.5 codebase.

10. Finally, reinstalled 3.1.3 because I need to use the CiviMail feature and its handy mailing capability far more often than I need to use the "Send Email to Contacts" feature.  Also I switched back to Sendmail because for me it seems to be a bit quicker and it's what I had been using before.

So, given these quick tests it seems like the following might be valid assertions:

* SMTP and Sendmail work for "Send Email to Contacts" with ver 3.1.3
* SMTP and Sendmail work for "New Mailing" wizard with ver 3.1.3
* SMTP and Sendmail work for "Send Email to Contacts" with ver 3.1.5
* SMTP and Sendmail do NOT work for "New Mailing" wizard with ver 3.1.5

Again, I am running CiviCRM in a Drupal 6.16 configuration on Apache through 1&1 Hosting, with MySQL v5.0.81 and PHP v5.2.13.  I have made no other changes to the system and all of my other Drupal modules are up-to-date.

I hope this has helped a bit, and again, please let me know how else I may be of service.  I'd like to keep using 3.1.5 as I'm sure it's a stronger release but as mentioned, we use the CiviMail mailing feature quite regularly so that's our focus of attention.

Again, thank you!
Steve


Code Block 1 -- Error message received when using SMTP with 3.1.5:

Code: [Select]

Sorry. A non-recoverable error has occurred.
recipient is not recognized

Return to home page.

Error Details:

Array
(
    [callback] => Array
        (
            [0] => CRM_Core_Error
            [1] => handle
        )

    {code} =>                     // Changed from [ ] to { } for this post
    [message] => recipient is not recognized
    [mode] => 16
    [debug_info] =>
    [type] => PEAR_Error
    [user_info] =>
    [to_string] => [pear_error: message="recipient is not recognized" code=0 mode=callback callback=CRM_Core_Error::handle prefix="" info=""]
)


Code Block 2 -- Error message received when using Sendmail with 3.1.5:

Code: [Select]

Sorry. A non-recoverable error has occurred.
sendmail returned error code 1

Return to home page.

Error Details:

Array
(
    [callback] => Array
        (
            [0] => CRM_Core_Error
            [1] => handle
        )

    {code} => 1                    // Changed from [ ] to { } for this post
    [message] => sendmail returned error code 1
    [mode] => 16
    [debug_info] =>
    [type] => PEAR_Error
    [user_info] =>
    [to_string] => [pear_error: message="sendmail returned error code 1" code=1 mode=callback callback=CRM_Core_Error::handle prefix="" info=""]
)


[xavier]

Hi,

Could you try using mail() instead of smtp/sendmail ? Might provide a clearer error message.

As for your email+first+last name, you don't have any "exotic" chars, like é or something non ascii ?

btw, are you on PHP safe mode ? (wild guess, but it makes a difference on the settings on the mail features, as you can't set the sender on a technical level -envelope email-).

X+

[Steve Baker]

Greetings again,

Thanks for the additional ideas.  I'm not sure how to use mail() instead of smtp/sendmail.  When I look at the "Settings for Outbound Email" screen I only see the two choices for SMTP and Sendmail (the third option is to disable outbound).  Might there be another configuration screen where I could make this change?

None of the email addresses in our list (and in particular, the one that I used for the "Send a Test Message" feature) have any exotic characters; just upper/lower case letters and a few numbers here and there, being sent to popular domains like gmail.com and aol.com.

And finally, I looked at the Drupal "Status report" screen where it tells me the version of PHP that I'm running, and when I clicked on that version number it brought up a whole screen full of configuration values.  I found the "safe_mode" setting and confirmed that it is set to "Off."

Back to using mail() for a clearer error message, please let me know how I might make this switch (it's probably something easy that I overlooked somewhere, sorry) and I'd be happy to let you know how things turn out (both with ver 5.1.3 and with 5.1.5).

Again, thanks,
Steve

[xavier]

Thanks for the additional ideas.  I'm not sure how to use mail() instead of smtp/sendmail.  When I look at the "Settings for Outbound Email" screen I only see the two choices for SMTP and Sendmail (the third option is to disable outbound).  Might there be another configuration screen where I could make this change?

I thought it was introduced in 3.1.5. My bad.

None of the email addresses in our list (and in particular, the one that I used for the "Send a Test Message" feature) have any exotic characters; just upper/lower case letters and a few numbers here and there, being sent to popular domains like gmail.com and aol.com.

And finally, I looked at the Drupal "Status report" screen where it tells me the version of PHP that I'm running, and when I clicked on that version number it brought up a whole screen full of configuration values.  I found the "safe_mode" setting and confirmed that it is set to "Off."

THen i'm running low on ideas.

http://en.flossmanuals.net/CiviCRM/DevelopTips

Try setting so it logs email to a file, see if there is something clearer about the recipient it doesn't seem to like.

X+

[Steve Baker]

Hi again,

OK, cool -- thanks for the link to the debug tips and tricks.  I'll setup the system to output to a log file and let you know what it says.

Just curious what might have changed between 3.1.3 and 3.1.4 (when the problems started happening) ... would it help if I took a closer look at the change logs for that release?  Maybe one of the updates/fixes would be a place to start?

(Things with CiviMail had been terrific since I started using CiviCRM back with version 1.9.13019.  I had not encountered any problems with CiviMail until 3.1.4 so that's why I was wondering what might've changed in that release.)

Since there's not a lot of other folks with the same problem, perhaps it's safe to assume that this is relatively unique to my configuration and/or host company (1&1)?  Maybe there's something that was changed from 3.1.3 to 3.1.4 that doesn't work well with whatever specifics my host company has?

Just looking to help narrow down the diagnostics, and again, your idea about logging emails to a file is a good one.
Cheers and thanks,
Steve

[nae]

Hi Steve,

I wanted to let you know that I do indeed have the exact same problem (error messages) as you have reported using SMTP in civimail. I am able to send an email from the summary screen no worries, but not from civimail.

I am running 3.1.5 and now on Drupal 6.17, with all modules up to date as well. I also was using civimail 3.1.3 without any problems previously (i skipped 3.1.4 and went straight to 3.1.5).

Can you let me know if you have had made any progress with this problem you could share?

Many thanks,
Renaee.

[Piotr Szotkowski]

I'll setup the system to output to a log file and let you know what it says.

Did you have any success?

Note that the problem was not with email addresses with non-standard characters, but rather with recipient names containing letters outside of a-z and A-Z.

[Piotr Szotkowski]

In general, the problem might be with how the PEAR libraries validate recipients (we had to introduce a workaround to get the libraries validate, but then fix the workaround twice – for empty names and for names with non-A-Z characters before they stopped eating emails).

On the brighter side, CiviCRM 3.2 will contain updated upstream libraries that fix the issue on their end (and so we dropped our workarounds in 3.2).

[civicrmsav]

Hi -

Just wanted to contribute that I am also having this problem with 3.15 (drupal 6.16),  I just upgraded from 2.2 where all was fine.   Here are the symptoms I am experiencing in hopes that someone more knowledgeable than I can point me in the right direction.

Notes:
-  I've tested with both SMTP & Sendmail, same behavior in both.
-  My default from address has a hyphen in it, but I've also tested selecting a from address for the mailing with no hyphen, with no change in behavior.

Symptoms
1.  Emails go out fine either when clicking "send an email" from an individual contact or from the find contacts page to a group of contacts.

2.  Checking the outbound settings on the "Settings - Outbound Mail" correctly sends an email.

3.  When using the 'send a test email' feature to either an individual or a group I get an error report.  Using Sendmail the report is "Sendmail returns error code 8".  When using SMTP the error code is "Invalid response code received from SMTP (outbound mail) server while attempting to send email. This is often caused by a misconfiguration in the CiviCRM Outbound Email settings. Please verify the settings at Administer CiviCRM >> Global Settings >> Outbound Email (SMTP)."

4.  When submitting a bulk mailing, no error is reported, but no email is received.  When I check with my hosting provider, they report that the email log shows the from address as my domain.  This should, I believe, show either the default from address or the from address I selected for the mailing.

This seems likely to be a bug in CiviMail where the from address is not properly being sent to the mailing tool.   Any help in debugging this would be much appreciated as it has rendered civimail useless to me until I can resolve this.

[civicrmsav]

Can anyone give me a push in the right direction to debug this?  I'm not sure how to start.  Many thanks.

[xavier]

Hi,

Are you on 3.1.5 ?

Seems that 3.2 is going to fix the problem (expected in a week or two). Could you install the latest beta on a COPY of your website to confirm the new version fix the problem ?


X+

P.S. They are a lot of reasons for the civimail NOT to work. This chapter explains hopefully clearly the steps involved (3.2, but most are the same).http://en.flossmanuals.net/CiviCRM/SystemConfiguration

[civicrmsav]

xavier --

Thanks so much for responding.   I just upgraded from 2.2 (where all worked fine) to 3.15.  (I don't know if you saw my earlier post in this thread with the details of what I'm experiencing).

In any case, I went to implement your suggestion of trying 3.2 on my test site, but before I did that I tested the existing install of 3.15 on the test site and guess what, it works!    So while I could install 3.2 there, I don't think it would tell me anything.

Nonetheless, it still doesn't work on my live site.  (Both sites are on the same host, two different domains.).    Does that information, in combination with my earlier post, suggest anything in particular to you that I can/should check?

I have done the obviously things like verify that my outbound settings work and check in with my host to look at the logs.  As I wrote before, my best guess at this point is that civimail is not posting a proper from: email to the email tool. 

If you could provide further assistance, it would be very much appreciated, thank you so much for your time.  I have not done any programming with civicrm, but if you point me at where to start I could at least do some reporting that would help me determine when civimail is losing track of the from address (assuming that's really what's happening.)

Thanks again.

[xavier]

In any case, I went to implement your suggestion of trying 3.2 on my test site, but before I did that I tested the existing install of 3.15 on the test site and guess what, it works!    So while I could install 3.2 there, I don't think it would tell me anything.

Nonetheless, it still doesn't work on my live site.  (Both sites are on the same host, two different domains.).   

What do you mean same host? same server ?

If you are sure that's the same civicrm version, that's either a difference on the server (is this the same mail server, eg postfix, same version ?)

... or a difference in config, same mailbox config ?

There is a difference somewhere, would be good to find it, so we can make more tests in civimail and hopefully provide a clearer error message
X+