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sendmail woes

mspiegel

Hello folks,

I am having trouble with iwsend_mail.ipl. When the script is invoked from a workflow that consists entirely of the email task, it works great. But after incorporating this task into a larger workflow, an email notification is not sent. debug_output from [iwsend_mail] is abolutely unhelpful. On an email success, I see the message "Completed Mail Notification." But on a failure, I see neither "Completed Mail Notification" nor "Failure to send email". Which is very strange, becuase from what I can tell from iwsend_mail.ipl, that means the script is exiting with a failure status even before it reaches the debug statement(!)

I've attached the syslog output that shows sendmail's logging messages. The top half is a successful email notification, the bottom is a failure.

I was wondering if anyone else has experienced this sort of behavior, before I have to go in and debug iwsend_mail.ipl (which I would rather avoid).

Thanks,
--Michael

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Adam Stoller

FAILURE
... to=jane.doe@foo.com, ctladdr=jane (10050/5013), ... stat=Service unavailable
sendmail[18065]: RAA18062: RAA18065: DSN: Service unavailable
sendmail[18065]: RAA18065: to=jane, delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=local, stat=Sent

SUCCESS
... to=jane.doe@foo.com, ctladdr=john (21123/1), stat=Sent (OK)

I'm not entirely sure about all the bits and pieces of information, but perhaps john is being found / being accepted to send email (I'm assuming that the ctladdr is probably the equivalent of From:) and jane is not being found / being accepted to send email? Something about the information "DSN: Service unavailable" gnaws at me as being significant...

BTW - it might help if you indicated what version of TeamSite you were using and on what platform ...

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

mspiegel

Thank you. I basically agree with your diagnosis, but still haven't discovered what the difference between the succesfull email and the failed email. Our version/platform is TeamSite 5.0.1 on Solaris SunOS 5.6.

I dug up some information about the "DSN: service unavailable" message: DSN does stand for "Delivery Status Notification", but sendmail will always log this e.g. when a "bounce" is generated, whether the user had requested a DSN or not (you will obviously get a bounce even if you didn't request a DSN).

The "Service unavailable" is a catch-all for a large group of problems that don't have a specific message such as "User unknown", among them many different forms of rejections that can occur during the SMTP dialogue when sending the message out.

Adam Stoller

TeamSite 5.0.1 -- I'd suggest upgrading to 5.5.2 at your earliest convenience (or start planning for upgrading to 6.x)

The version of iwsend_mail.ipl in 5.0.1 had a number of problems, one of which is that it aborts completely if it encounters a problem trying to send email to the SMTP server (so your workflows will hang because no callback is performed).

However, this doesn't explain why it's working for one address and not the other. Is it consistant which addresses are working and which aren't?
Do you use the email_map.cfg file?
Is an address of userid@$maildomain (as defined in iw.cfg) valid email addresses?

I think you'll have to do a bit more digging and provide a bunch more information for anyone here to really assist you - and even then, it will probably be easier to diagnose if on-site and able to reproduce the problem.

You might try getting your local email administrator / network admin / IT person(s) involved - as you'll probably have to trace all the calls that are being made back and forth to the various services.

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

mspiegel

So it turns out that one of the mail transfer agents on our network does not accept excessively long lines of characters. We're still investigating which MTA is the culprit.

In the meantime, I've added a substitution regex into the iwsend_mail.ipl script to insert newlines at least every 80 characters. It has to make sure not to seperate html braces with newlines, because that screws up the html. The line is:

$message =~ s/(.{80,}?>)/$1\n/g;

and insert it after all the pieces of $message are concatonated, and before the message is sent.

Quite a fix! How do I contact somebody at Interwoven and pass this along to them?

Adam Stoller

As I indicated before iwsend_mail.ipl went through a number of changes since 5.0.1 - however, looking at a 5.5.2 SP2b version I see that the addition of newlines in HTML-formatted email doesn't seem to have made it in there [hmm].

If you have that version of the script, it's relatively easy to fix - look for the get_task_* functions and where they have code like:

$msg = join("", 
            ...);

change the "" to "\n". (I'd have to look at it more closely to see if there are any bad ramifications of doing that within the existing code though - and that's not really my job anymore...)
Regardless though, you really should upgrade beyond 5.0.1 as soon as you can.

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

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