[clue-tech] mail works some of the time

[Greg Knaddison]

On 5/5/06, David L. Anselmi <anselmi at anselmi.us> wrote:
> Can't you just give the details you have so far to the server/mail
> admins?  They're the ones with the info to find the problem and they're
> the ones with the access to fix it.
>
> If you haven't asked them for help, you should.  It might be easier for
> them to fix the problem than to sanitize log files to give you.

I've done that - but it's a shared hosting account (powweb) with slow response.

> Can you tell us more about the script that's sending the mails?  How do
> you update it?  What user does it run as?  What kind of server is it and
> what else does it do besides host your script?  By "no direct access" do
> you mean you can't log in?  But you can load and run scripts, right?

The script sending the mail is Drupal - using the php "mail" function
- line 404 of

http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/drupal/modules/user.module?annotate=1.612.2.5

I'm not sure the user that it is running as.  My guess is httpd or
nobody - but I'm pretty sure it's not a user specific to my site.  It
is a big cluster of shared servers running ftp, http, smtp, and I'm
sure several other services for a variety of domains.

I don't have shell access - just ftp and a "control panel".  And yes,
I can load/run scripts.

> You said that incoming mail works fine.  What does that mean?  Any mail
> sent to the script user shows up where?  If the script user can get mail
> you'd probably have seen bounces.

Meaning mail sent to the domain from other hosts gets distributed to
the accounts that I have setup.  At least I haven't heard of any
messages getting dropped on that side.

> There are probably ways for you to troubleshoot this from your
> application but you'd need to know the details of how the app sends mail.

Thanks for your advice and your questions.  Since I have limited
access to the server/logs I'm thinking of putting in a log statement
next to each "mail" function call so I can see the times that the
software is trying to send mails.  Looking in the log files of Drupal
- there are no error messages related to mail in the last few days, so
my guess is that the mail() function is returning just fine and then
somewhere in the chain after that the message gets dropped.

I'm still waiting on a response from their support... :(  I didn't
choose powweb, but I'm glad to have experience with them to be able to
give advice to people about it...

Thanks,
Greg