[Contrib: Evaluation System] Email notification problem

[Bryan Bakotich]

Here's the JIRA. *EVALSYS-724 
<http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/EVALSYS-724>
*-Bryan

Aaron Zeckoski wrote:
> 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
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> evaluation mailing list
>> evaluation at collab.sakaiproject.org
>> http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/evaluation
>>
>> TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send email to evaluation-unsubscribe at collab.sakaiproject.org with a subject of "unsubscribe"
>>
>>     
>
>
>
>   


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