Re: [Evolution] Re: [Users] The SMTP Problem...

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

On Sat, 2003-01-04 at 16:45, Bill Hartwell wrote:
> On Sat, 2003-01-04 at 14:21, Kris Stark wrote:
> > More interestingly even - why did that one message cause a failure of
> > the entire queue?  (Obvious, as it is a queue...)  However, this should
> > have some sort of a system in place to allow recovery from errors such
> > as this...
> >
> > Kris
> >
> > On Sat, 2003-01-04 at 16:11, Bill Hartwell wrote:
> > > Now the question comes of...how did Evolution queue a message with no
> > > recipients? For that matter, how did it lose the recipients when it was
> > > nothing more than a reply to a message on the list, which should have
> > > automatically brought the addresses over from the message it was a reply
> > > to?
>
> I thought of that, but I think for that to work might require a
> different format for storing messages. Actually, that is a good
> question...does Evolution use mbox or mdir format?

by default it uses mbox, but that is pretty much irrelevant as Outbox is
a queue. It'd be more complicated to make it skip messages that it can't
send because of the way error reporting works.

>  And would one allow
> for some code that would skip over bad messages while the other doesn't,
> or does it really matter?

well, eventually the suer has to do something to "fix" that message
anyway. might as well do it sooner than later :-)

> I haven't seen a single email client yet that can recover from this
> error - but generally the error message will say something about the
> address blocks being empty, rather than simply relaying the error
> message it gets from the server.

The SMTP code has one final check that it does, but the check could be
made better as well. Currently it simply checks recipients != NULL, but
in this case recipients *isn't* NULL, it's just an empty array of
addresses. If I make it check recipients != empty-array, then I can
report the "You haven't specificed any recipients" error message instead
of what the server reports I suppose.

Probably not a bad idea anyway.

Jeff

-- 
Jeffrey Stedfast
Evolution Hacker - Ximian, Inc.
fejj ximian com  - www.ximian.com