[Contrib: Evaluation System] Email notification problem

[Aaron Zeckoski]

Seems like a reasonable fix to me. Can you create a JIRA and I will
apply the fix to trunk?
-AZ


On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 1:21 AM, Bryan Bakotich <bakotibj at plu.edu> wrote:
> 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
>
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-- 
Aaron Zeckoski (aaronz at vt.edu)
Senior Research Engineer - CARET - Cambridge University
[http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/~aaronz/]
Sakai Fellow - [http://aaronz-sakai.blogspot.com/]