Mail/Send error leads to infinite loop and cron crash

teite11
Sounds like things are almost fine. It must be something erratic on your side. It is working fine for us.

You need to debug the sending process then in more detail. Something that a Drupal expert should be able to.
Sorry, with the provided information we won't be able to understand the source of your specific issue nor will we be able to solve it.

Greetings

My simplenews just stopped working too. Log entries say they are sending out out but not receiving tests or group sends.

How can I debug the sending process? Let me know and I will do it. Thanks.

If drupal / php confirms the sending process, debugging is a server management task - no more drupal.
If you e.g. have root access to a server, you usually can see what happens on the system maillog (outgoing mails) with
# tail -f /var/log/mail.log
Fatal errors might be in
# tail -f /var/log/mail.error
There are many reasons possible that a mailing system stops working. You really need someone that understands your server to lookup what happens.

Note that we can't help you any further since this is completely hosting provider / server setup specific.

Taite11, see #3 and #5

We won't be able to help you with the provided information. Sorry.

Note that we've developed a module to do debugging of sending processes without bothering any clients:
http://drupal.org/project/maillog

Disable real sending in the module settings and enable logging.
You can now play as much as you like to reproduce any issues... including cron.

Enjoy debugging!

Thank you for this detailled research.
I like first to fix this in 6--2 and then do a backport in 6--1...

I think if a send fails we should simply mark it as failed and continue with others. We might retry once later, but this is not so important compared to the need to finally cancel this specific address if failing.

I'm setting this even to critical since the send process is completely broken if our address check (by checking the string format only) knows less than the real send tries to do (such as a dns lookup)...

Bumping this issue also.
I's like to see this fixed before 6--2 is getting released.

Is someone working on this?

Duplicated by
#757830: simplenews fails when invalid email encountered

subscribing

OK here we go.
In case of error i've fixed the infinite loop. Send errors now are set to HOLD state where no retry occurs. If you hit this case situation you need manual interaction with the database since no further action (like unsubscribe, ...) is performed.
All related data remains in the database.
Changing priority to normal.

However we need another cycle to rework the code.
It should introduce a retry cycle count in {simplenews_mail_spool} where higher cycle counts get retries with lower priorities. In addition we need a try timestamp to make sure retries happen not too early.

Spool management functions should be reworked. We should NOT load all recipients (one per line) into PHP and then add them line by line into the database. This won't scale for huge lists - see simplenews_send_node:

SELECT s.mail
FROM {simplenews_subscriptions} s
...
while ($account = db_fetch_object($result)) {
  $mails[] = array('mail' => $account->mail);
}

Also we should have an error counter for stat reasons after send complete to represent the data.

Finally we might add a send/try log as a separate table to track issue / client states / history.

May be some integration with another module to validate the email address will help.
I think that this happends mostly with anonimous suscribers.
Validation can be delegated to Email Verify module for example ( http://drupal.org/project/email_verify ).

jmriviero,
I support optional integration of this module.
I see that the module implementation won't correspond to everyones' wishes (additional delay in processes, source of faults, ...). Whoever don't agree with the modules' functionality won't install it ;-) so we're fine with optionally supporting it. No options needed.

Please add a separate feature request for its integration and provide a patch to add it to the module.

EDIT: the module seems pretty unmaintained and has many critical issues... so for me this is very low priority and i won't work on the integration - just add it if provided. Note that adding some check like that needs high quality as it adds lot of frustration to users. I personally prefer to have wrong adresses accepted than reject good ones...

Anyway: We MUST still improve the sending process since all addresses still have the risk of potential failure at any time - even after the best check.

@miro_dietiker
My point is not the integration or a new feature, thought it may be a quick way to avoid emails that pass core valid_email_address function and the concept behind email verify sounds good.
It's incredible that after all the years of use of the email, we are still trying to find a way to validate it.

Well ... we can't change the history of the net and the - sometimes - bizarre situations resulting ;-)

Pity is also that drupal core seems not to provide a way to hook / extend email address validation...

I've added the feature request item myself:
#948894: Add better email validation support

Now hurry back to work on the sending code! ;-)

As #948894: Add better email validation support status is now to "needs review", should we match the status of this one accordingly, or just wait for the other one to be fixed to reflect it here ?

Simon: Better email validation support is important - but is no warranty that the mail send process works with success.
It is still possible that a previously validated mail finally fails on a mail send.
(e.g. users might delete their mailbox, even domains might disappear, ...)

However, currently the crash condition is fixed. What's remaining is reworking it a little... (see comment #15)