Watcher emails not sending; a permissions/email error

[jsfritz]

Hello,

When looking over a ticket someone noticed two errors: (Cerberus Helpdesk version 4.0 build 642)

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[error]: delete note
Date: Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:32:49 -0400

Exception thrown while sending email: Unable to open file '/var/www/html/cerberus/storage/attachments/045/771 for reading. Check the file permissions.
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[error]: delete note
Date: Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:33:04 -0400

Exception thrown while sending watcher email: There was a problem reading line 1 of an SMTP response. The response so far was:<br />[]. It appears the connection has died without saying goodbye to us! Too many emails in one go perhaps? (fsockopen: #0)
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Now, this may explain why one of our users is not getting watcher emails at all -- but that's another story.

For some reason in the first error, the attachment file in question was chmodded to 400 and was owned by a specific user on our system. Not sure how this happened? I chmodded the entire storage directory recursively to 777, owned by apache. Probably not the best idea, but it's only an intranet server and we need watcher emails to work correctly.

I don't know how to test this further because those error messages have only occurred on this one ticket so far.

As far as the second error, I have no idea what could cause it or how to test/fix it or even if it could possibly be caused by the first error. Could someone give me more information?

[Hildy]

The first note seems most likely to have been caused by the funky permissions, though every file in that tree should be owned by your apache user... no idea how it got chmod/chowned that way, though.

The second is one we see occasionally from a busy SMTP server, where it drops the connection after sending the mail, but without properly closing it. It almost always means the mail sent, but just disconnected improperly. It shouldn't have any relation to the first error.

As to the Worker who's not getting watcher emails, you should check to make sure his email address isn't mistyped, etc.

[jsfritz]

The user's email in question seems to be correct and settings are OK. Are there mail logs where I can check to see if they are even being mailed out, and if so, if they're being mailed out correctly?

[Hildy]

No, there are no mail logs, though you can probably tweak it to make a note of when it sends mail. It'd be better to look at the logs built into the SMTP server, though.