cron job aborts when bad email found on POP server!

[Doug I.]

Hi,

I am posting this problem & solution here to save other kayako members from the hours of torture I had pinpointing this issue.

There is a bug with Kayako's cron job (latest version 3.11.01) when receiving email that will cause the mail parser to simply halt and not continue checking the rest of the email queue.

Kayako could certainly make the argument that the mail server should not have allowed a malformed SPAM email into the mailbox to begin with, and so I have notified the makers of the popular MailEnable Software of this issue as well.

I would still lean toward suggesting that Kayako's cron job should skip problematic emails versus simply crashing and not even recording a problem in the Kayako log file.

I have attached the malformed email source that will cause SupportSuite mail check process to fail. It took some debug log checks on the mail server side of things for me to identify that Kayako was clearly stopping the email retrieval process when it came across this mailbox message.

If someone from Kayako would be so kind to post this bug in the bug tracker, I think it will save you a lot of headaches when others claim that their POP mail is suddenly not retrieving messages.

Later,
Doug

[Jamie Edwards]

Hi Doug,

I have submitted it here; http://bugs.kayako.com/index.php?cmd=view&id=289 - I agree the parser should not crash out.

[Jamie Edwards]

Hi there,

As per: Kayako Bug Tracker - Viewing Issue #289 - Malformed spam message causes mail parser to crash

Ryan has found:

Sorry, but the parser doesn't "crash" when processing this message; it properly says that there were no recipients found and it ends up in the parser log as an error.

Can you confirm the same on 3.20.02?

[Toby H]

I believe I am seeing an alike issue, althought havent yet pin pointed it.

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That is what my cron email is returning, and the cron is not working, this is a fresh install

[Toby H]

Does anyone have any ideas on this? It's kind of holding up our new site roll out

Thanks!

[dskaist]

I had the same issue yesterday, and I dioscovered there was very little disk space left on the system partition on the kayako server.

I dont know if it is related, but once I cleared out the space, the mails started turning into tickets again...

[craigbrass]

You are correct. Running out of disk space is likely to cause such an issue.

[Casey Rousseau]

If all else fails at removing the malformed message from the mailbox, you may need to delete and recreate it. That's what we've ended up doing from time to time with particularly pernicious emails. I wouldn't blame Kayako. At some point, you can just fail to have a valid mailbox anymore.

[John Haugeland]

Craig is completely incorrect. The amount of available space on the partition that Kayako is on has no bearing on SupportSuite functioning correctly; with the exception of the /files and /cache directories, SupportSuite can run happily from read-only storage. SupportSuite does not use the disk for temporary storage.

What may, however, be germane is whether that's the partition that MySQL is on.

[craigbrass]

That really depends on what you mean by "running out of disk space". If you are on a dedicated, I am unsure what would happen because of never being in this situation. On shared hosting using a control panel (cPanel is one I have had this happen with a few times), it can do weird things when a script tries to write to the space. I was assuming the latter.

[John Haugeland]

Craig, at no point will cPanel cause these effects, whether or not the SS partition is full.

[craigbrass]

After re-reading what he said, I was assuming without the need to. As in my last post, I was thinking about a disk space limit from a control panel. I see above he is talking about physical disk partitions.

[John Haugeland]

The disk limit from the control panel wouldn't do that either, Craig.

[craigbrass]

I suggest you try it, John and see what happens. When scripts try to write to the space, it does some weird things.