piping worked for months - then suddenly stopped

[Rodney B]

Has anybody had piping setup correctly and running beautifully...and then suddenly stop working?

That seems to be what happened with our setup.

Everything was working fine for months, then one day we get a ticket with a 4MB bmp email attachment (not sure if there's any correlation) and suddenly, our kayako installation stopped processing emails.

If you would send an email to our support email, it would actually get piped into Kayako, but kayako would deliver a "bounced email" message tot he sender and no confirmation of the email ticket would be received. No alert of the new ticket would be sent to staff either.

If we replied to the ticket via the web interface, no alert would be sent to the user that we replied to their issue.

All outgoing emails from kayako just simply stopped working.

And before you ask, yes, I submitted an official support ticket to kayako and they looked into it, but couldn't figure out what was happening. They said I had to switch to pop/imap. I'm in the process of doing that now, but I'm not sure how switching to POP will make outgoing emails start working. It's worth a shot.

I'm posting this here just in case another user may have a solution to the problem or if they may have had this same thing happen.

I really prefer piping over POP since it is so instant.

[Jamie Edwards]

Hi Rodney,

Has anything changed on your system? Upgraded PHP, Aoache or mail transport versions? General server updates?

This problem usually arises after an update to one of the aforementioned packages has occured.

[Rodney B]

Yes, PHP was recently upgraded on the server. I think it was because WHM/Cpanel did the update automatically.

Is there a way to get it working again after PHP has been upgraded?

[Jamie Edwards]

I don't know, there isn't a "this is broken" and "this is how to fix it" when the issue is as vague as that - it would be something to ask your host to investigate. It might help if you post the bounce e-mail / error.

[Rodney B]

We're on a dedicated server and I checked with the support techs.

The problem is that all the other email on the server is working. All the other PHP applications on the server are still able to send and receive email.

That seemed to leave the problem with kayako. They said if they knew what they should be looking for (like some specific function that kayako uses), it would help them diagnose it. But since everything else it working, they don't have much to go on.

Here's the bounce message I receive ("examplified") :

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

pipe to |/usr/bin/php /home/example/public_html/help/cli/index.php
generated by support@example.com
local delivery failed

The following text was generated during the delivery attempt:

------ pipe to |/usr/bin/php /home/example/public_html/help/cli/index.php
generated by support@example.com ------

X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.7
Content-type: text/html

[Rodney B]

Just to close this out for anybody that may run across this thread later. The problem was:

WHM upgraded PHP automatically one night during its nightly run.

When PHP got upgraded, it left out the mbstring requirement that was previously compiled in PHP.

This caused all the bounce errors all of a sudden.

Since kayako was the only script that was using mbstring, my server techs didn't know what the cause was.

Kayako support finally pointed me to the missing mbstring in the upgraded PHP.

We had the server techs recompile PHP with mbstring and voila, the email piping is now working again

Happy New Year!

[Jamie Edwards]

Good to know it is working Rodney. Happy new years