[rt-users] rt-mailgate losing messages on failures

[Bruce Campbell]

On Mon, 11 Nov 2002, Vivek Khera wrote:

> Last week, I got a blank message from RT as a queue watcher/admin.
> Today I got another as a response to an open ticket I'm handling.
>
> RT's logs had this to say:
>
> [Mon Nov 11 19:34:20 2002] [crit]: RT::Attachment->Create couldn't, as
> you didn't specify a transaction

The only time I've seen this has been when we've received a message with a
blank body.  rt-mailgate attempts to create the ticket, but borks on doing
the attachment, leaving you with a ticket in an indeterminate, but usually
blank, state.

> Shouldn't rt-mailgate fail-safe to just forward the message intact to
> the list admin and/or ticket owner?

It should.  I suspect that because the MTA indicated a complete message
being passed, rt-mailgate is assuming that it has a body.

> I have no clue as to the content of this message that would cause such
> an issue, and I'm probably gonna look like an idoit for not responding
> to that message...

We're a tad paranoid, and dump all the incoming mails into an archival
mechanism before passing it to RT (which is how we found it), so if you've
got rt-mailgate configured to retry in case of failure, you end up with 1
+ ( number_of_minutes_until_someone_notices / mail_retry_period ) blank
tickets in RT.

-- 
                             Bruce Campbell                            RIPE
                   Systems/Network Engineer                             NCC
                 www.ripe.net - PGP562C8B1B             Operations/Security