No email notification if subject exceed 46 characters: "Could not send message using Email to user ID"

Thanks @digitisation. I assumed @title was just the title of the failed email, so wasn't worried that it wasnt printing out, but it is actually debug information.

So now the error message I get is:
Could not send message using Email to user ID 8.

Though i think we already knew it was a problem with sending messages "using Email" so i'm not sure that is terribly helpful.

OK, one more piece of debug info:

When i create a post, there are actually 2 emails that are sent. When I get the error message but still receive the email, it is because I am receiving 1 of the 2 emails but not the other. When I do not get the error message, I receive both emails.

This is the email I always receive, whether or not I get the error message:

from: my_websites_email@mail.com
to: my_personal_email@mail.com
subject:  New post in group
body:  
Hello user8,

There is a new post called new test of email notification errors that belongs
to one of the groups you are subscribed to.

Below is the email i DO NOT receive when i get the error message:

From: my_websites_email@mail.com
To: my_personal_email@mail.com
Subject:  New Post in hello: test post 
Hi user8,

user8 created the Post “test post” on example.com  in the
hello [1] group on Tue, 06/04/2013 - 6:03pm:


this is the body text.

Permalink: http://example.com/node/378
Add a comment at http://example.com/node/378#comment-form

Change email notifications at
http://example.com/user/8/notification-settings


[1] http://example.com/groups/hello

Which at least means the error message is accurate, that an email is not being sent when it should be. No idea why the message sometimes fails though.

After further debugging:
The problem of the email notification not sending and receiving the error message in the log file "Could not send message using Email to user ID" happens for me iff the email attempting to be sent has a subject line that is longer than 46 characters. 46 sends fine, if the subject line is 47 or more characters it fails, no email is sent, and error messages to the log file.

• My server email log file does not show any errors on sending mail, which suggests that the message is never getting from drupal/php to the mail system. So it's not a mail sending problem, but somewhere in the code that it is choking.
• Also I have confirmed that message_notify generated emails are the only ones with this problem. Other emails with long subject lines (like via webform and rules) are sent without a problem. But anything message_notify fails based on length of subject line.
• The confusion I reported in my OP with seeing the error message even though sometimes I received an email had to do with having enabled both a Rules-based notification as well as message_notify. the rule always succeeded in sending email, whereas message_notify most often fails.

I'm now running message_notify 7.x-2.5+0-dev as part of commons 3.3

@Amitaibu, I have no idea. I don't know how to do that.

I think the likeliest thing is that it's a config/conflict or something rather than an absolute failure with message_notify code, but I'm not sure how to continue debugging or how to fix. Any suggestions on this would be appreciated.

• I will also add that when I look at the messages at admin/content/message, they are correct regardless of subject length, so it's not a problem with the message itself, but somewhere with getting it to the email.

current workaround is to make subject lines a fixed length <46 and not include the node title or other variable token-based info in the subject.

@dangermonkey:
Are you also having problems with having emails sent?

In order to edit your subject lines (or other info/text in the emails) go to
admin/structure/messages
Then you can edit the messages that are sent by email (which in Commons3.3 I think are the following). I made them fixed-length by removing the token and only including fixed text.

• The notification sent when a user creates a node. (Machine name: commons_notify_node_created)
• Commons Notify: Comment created (Machine name: commons_notify_comment_created)
• The notification sent when a user creates a node that is not in any groups (Machine name: commons_notify_node_created_no_groups)

I've received a question from another person who gets the same problem, with a request for more clarification on how to change the subject length, so here are further instructions.
- go to admin/structure/messages
- select which message you want to modify. For this example I'll do commons_notify_comment_created
- so you can click the "edit" link next to the particular message, or for this example I wind up at:
admin/structure/messages/manage/commons_notify_comment_created
- then you can edit the View modes: Notify - Email subject
- I changed my subject to be
New Comment posted on [site:name]
(it still uses a token, but the token is a fixed length and not very long)
- the ORIGINAL subject was: New comment on [message:field-target-nodes:0:title] in [message:field-target-nodes:0:og-group-ref:0:title]: [message:field-target-nodes:0:title] which included the comment title, what group it was in, etc etc which made the length unpredictable and over 46 characters.
- Make changes for all the messages that get sent via email, which I listed in comment #9, for Commons.

Here is a screenshot of the message management page:

Hope this helps.

EDIT: Actually I can confirm this is happening on a clean Commons 3.5 installation.
DC 3.5
Message 7.x-1.9
Message Notify 7.x-2.5
Message Subscribe 7.x-1.0-rc1
Message Subscribe Email 7.x-1.0-rc1

@bjlewis2, sounds like your setup might be the likeliest to be able to have the maintainers reproduce so we can get this debugged.
Can you reproduce on a clean install? and/or how much customization and contrib modules have you added?

Thanks for looking into it @ezra-g.

It seems likely that it's a server config issue...since it happens reliably for some of us and not at all for others.

In another issue @lightsurge suggested this might be the likely culprit: #300387: drupal_mail_send with long UTF-8 subject puts \n to subject line, the mail() function won't send it then.

I have not yet had a chance to try any of those suggestions in that issue... it's all a bit beyond my scope.
I'm not sure how pervasive this is amongst the general commons userbase? Or if there's a commons-based workaround for it.

Also, I kind of wound up opening two issues on this topic before I realized they were the same cause. this issue and also #1993196: Email notifications are not sent when subject exceeds 46 characters. Don't know if we should close one or the other as a dupe, or close both as a dupe of the known UTF issue?