[Contrib: Evaluation System] Email notification problem

[Bryan Bakotich]

Hi all,

Our mailserver administrator recently made a configuration change that 
made some of Sakai's email functionality stop working. Here is a summary 
of the changes he made:

Originally, our MTA was configured to pass messages with an empty To
field.  In the case an MUA sent a message with only Bcc recipients, our
MTA munged all recipients into the To field.  Only some MUA actually
send blank To fields.  For instance, Thunderbird does not (even when the
user doesn't enter a To address), but squirrelmail does.  This was an
obvious risk, despite our training of user to put, at least, themselves
in the To field of a Bcc'd message.  Our MTA, however, has the option to
handle blank To fields (an explicit violation of RFC 822).  The options
allow blocking the message, rewriting all recipients into the CC, BCC,
or To field.  We have chosen to block the message on the ground of a
protocol violation.  Most MUAs, such as Thunderbird are fine because
they fill a blank To field with "no-recpients" or something of the
like.  Also, many automated senders using MTA's like sendmail, MMDF, and
qmail, are configured to do the same.


After this change the mailtool and the automatic notifications from the 
Evaluation System stopped working. The mailtool problems are described 
in *SAK-11437 <http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-11437> *and 
fixed in the mailsender (I applied a local patch to fix the mailtool).

When I looked in the logs to verify that the Evaluation System was 
sending out the notifications like it was supposed to I noticed that 
there was no headerTo value in the Email.sendMail INFO message. To fix 
this I modified line 947 of EvalExternalLogicImpl.java from:
emailService.sendMail(fromAddress, toAddresses, subject, message, null, 
replyTo, null);
to:
emailService.sendMail(fromAddress, toAddresses, subject, message, 
toAddresses, replyTo, null);

This fixed the problem. I was wondering if there is a different way I 
should have done this, or if this should be merged in so other people 
with a mailserver configuration similar to ours doesn't run into this 
problem. Any thoughts on this would be very much appreciated.

-Bryan

Sakai version: 2.5.x revision 55623
Evaluation version: 1.2.0
MySQL 4

-- 
Bryan Bakotich
Open Source Implementation Specialist
Digital Media Center, Information & Technology Services
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA 98447-0013
Phone: 253-536-5021