PHP mail() woes

[fouldragon at aol.com]

Well, I looked through the logs and found it tended to occur in 
blocks... you'd have a day or two (I think the longest stretch was ~5 
days) when it would occur often, and then weeks at a time when it 
wouldn't at all.

It didn't seem to be a 100% go/no-go thing that I can see... for 
example, we had someone who triggered a message spurt nine times over a 
~30 minute period during the last problem block, and six went normally, 
three failed.

The other problem is that I can't know it's failing WHEN it happens, 
only after... basically I do "grep sendmail error_log | wc -l" and as 
long as the number hasn't gone up, we're fine.  If it's redlining 
something for 10 seconds at a time, it's back to normal before I can go 
and fire up any measurements.

Maybe it should email me if it can't send email? :D :D :D

Of course, it hasn't done it in like 28 hours now, but it matters to me 
that I can know what's wrong, in the event it happens again.


-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Dean <alex at crackpot.org>
To: Main PLUG discussion list <plug-discuss at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us>
Sent: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 4:24 pm
Subject: Re: PHP mail() woes









Floyd Arguello wrote: 

> On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 9:09 PM,  <fouldragon at aol.com> wrote: 

>> Weird amusement: 

>> 

>> #service qmail stop 

>> Stopping service qmail:# 

>> (for some reason, it never says "[OK]", wether you stop or restart) 

>> 

>> Run the "send 50 messages to hopeless at invalid.invalid" script. 

>> 

>> Wait for it to finish - doesn't report the mail() calls failed 

>> 

>> restart in a panic (it is a production box after all :P)  service 
qmail 

>> start 

>> 

>> They seem to have processed normally, like it respawned qmail on 
demand 

>> of the php script requesting sendmail.  Is that how it's supposed to 

>> operate? 

>> 

>> Also, reviewing the logs, it seems that it occurs in blocks... 
you'll 

>> get a bunch of failures for a few days, then none for 20 days or so 
at 

>> a time (the server typically gets 15-30 or so days uptime, and it's 
at 

>> 29+) 
 

FWIW, years ago I used a PHP script to send hundreds of thousands of
emails a week with no issues, and it wasn't a whole lot more than a
wrapper around the mail() function.  (No, not spam.  Newsletters people
subscribed to.) 
 

When you get a bunch of failures, are some messages sent correctly and
others die, or does everything break during a fixed window of time?
Having everything run fine, then everything fails for a while, then
works again with no apparent change on your end, sounds like some
service you're relying on is going away then coming back. 
 

If so : 

  * Maybe DNS is slow sometimes? 

  * Is qmail sending mail directly, or just handing the mail off to
another server (smarthost, I think its called)?  If that upstream 
server
is busy/unavailable periodically, that would be an issue. 
 

alex 









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