Re: More/new smtp issues

Albrecht Dreß <[email protected]> Sat, 28 Oct 2017 15:44:01 +0200
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.gnome.apps.balsa
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Hi Jack:

Am 27.10.17 23:12 schrieb(en) Jack:
> Up until a few weeks/months ago, I had no problem sending mail through my frontier.com account.  At some point, however, it just stopped going, but did not provide any error message.  I have looked through previous email threads on this list about this very topic, but nothing there seems to make any difference now.

Can you narrow down the point where the issue occurred, in particular if it is linked to a certain Git version?

> Using Albrecht's suggestion of "G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=all balsa > LOG.out 2>&"  (modified to combine stdout and stderror to one file) and then trimming down the file, I get the following when starting balsa, toggling off the flag on the message in the outbox, and trying to send again:
[snip]
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: libbalsa_smtp_server_trylock: lock frontier: 1
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: libbalsa_smtp_server_trylock: lock gmail: 1
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: libbalsa_smtp_server_trylock: lock yahoo: 1
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: finalised connection to smtp.gmail.com
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: libbalsa_smtp_server_unlock: unlock gmail
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: finalised connection to smtp.mail.yahoo.com:587
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: libbalsa_smtp_server_unlock: unlock yahoo

This is the normal behaviour when you try to send queues messages.  The process tries to acquire a lock for each of your SMTP servers as to avoid races before running the connection check (which may take some time).  If no pending message for a particular server is in the queue, the lock is released.  The “finalised connection to…” indicates that the corresponding libnetclient object has been destroyed.  Note that no network connection has been established for them.

> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: balsa_send_message_real: starting
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: connected to smtp.frontier.com
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: R '220 relay03.roch.ny.frontiernet.net ESMTP Postfix'
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: W 'EHLO ffortso4'
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: R '250-relay03.roch.ny.frontiernet.net'
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: R '250-PIPELINING'
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: R '250-SIZE 36350634'
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: R '250-ETRN'
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: R '250-AUTH PLAIN LOGIN'
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: R '250-AUTH=PLAIN LOGIN'
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: R '250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES'
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: R '250-8BITMIME'
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: R '250 DSN'
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: balsa_send_message_real: connect = 0 [0xc02480]: 'relay03.roch.ny.frontiernet.net ESMTP Postfix'

Hmmm, “connect = 0” means that starting the connection failed.  Balsa /should/ show you an error message in this case…

How is the SMTP server configured?  If the “Security” setting is “TLS required”, the explanation would be that the remote server does not offer the STARTTLS command, i.e. it expects you to send your authentication *without* encryption (which would be a *really* bad idea!).  However, the call to net_client_smtp_connect() (in libbalsa/send.c, line 1008) should return the error message “remote server does not support STARTTLS” in this case.

> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: libbalsa_smtp_server_unlock: unlock frontier
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: W 'QUIT'
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: R '221 2.0.0 Bye'
> ** (balsa:2296): DEBUG: finalised connection to smtp.frontier.com

O.k., this looks normal.

> One question is that I don't understand why libbalsa_smtp_server_trylock shows up for all three defined outgoing mail servers.  frontier is the one in question.  The other two work fine.

See explanation above.

> The issue is that I get no error message at all - balsa just sets the flag on the message and leaves it in the outbox.

This is really strange indeed.  How did you configure Balsa regarding the handling of error messages?

You could apply the following (untested) patch as to display the error message in the debug output:

[snip]
--- a/libbalsa/send.c
+++ b/libbalsa/send.c
@@ -1006,7 +1006,8 @@ balsa_send_message_real(SendMessageInfo *info)

      /* connect the SMTP server */
      result = net_client_smtp_connect(info->session, &greeting, &error);
-    g_debug("%s: connect = %d [%p]: '%s'", __func__, result, info->items, greeting);
+    g_debug("%s: connect = %d [%p]: '%s' (%s)", __func__, result, info->items, greeting,
+           (error != NULL) ? error->message : "no error");
      g_free(greeting);
      if (result) {
          GList *this_msg;
[/snip]

> This is with balsa 2.5.3a-187-g7291ba34 compiled from git.  I don't think that is quite the latest, so slap my wrist if there are more recent commits which might make a difference.

At first glance nothing which would explain your issue.  Updating to a recent git version would be a good idea, though.

Cheers,
Albrecht.

_______________________________________________
balsa-list mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/balsa-list
signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 473 B)