[Solved] Impossible to send message

[mcampbell]

So I have an instance of OTRS stood up for about a year now, and during this time, it's been running near flawlessly. Last week, my support team started noticing the occasional error, such as below pop up when trying to respond to a ticket:

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Oops! An Error occurred.
Error Message: Impossible to send message to: some.customer@example.com, .
.
You can Send a bugreport or go back to the previous page.
Error Details
Backend ERROR: OTRS-CGI-10 Perl: 5.10.1 OS: linux Time: Wed Dec 4 10:59:01 2013 Message: Impossible to send message to: some.customer@example.com, . Traceback (16653): Module: Kernel::System::Ticket::Article::ArticleSend (v1.311.2.2) Line: 2176 Module: Kernel::Modules::AgentTicketEmail::Run (v1.206.2.6) Line: 1146 Module: Kernel::System::Web::InterfaceAgent::Run (v1.64) Line: 868 Module: ModPerl::ROOT::ModPerl::Registry::opt_otrs_bin_cgi_2dbin_index_2epl::handler (unknown version) Line: 46 Module: (eval) (v1.90) Line: 204 Module: ModPerl::RegistryCooker::run (v1.90) Line: 204 Module: ModPerl::RegistryCooker::default_handler (v1.90) Line: 170 Module: ModPerl::Registry::handler (v1.99) Line: 31

With the frequency of these happening more often as time went on. Now, when the error popped up, the email doesn't appear to have actually sent, but it does appear in the ticket chain.

So I went to /var/log/messages, and fortunately, there were some more useful messages:

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Dec  4 10:59:01 otrs OTRS-CGI-10[16653]: [Error][Kernel::System::Email::SMTP::Send][Line:117]: Can't connect to smtp.ex1.secureserver.net: Bad file descriptor!
Dec  4 10:59:01 otrs OTRS-CGI-10[16653]: [Info][Kernel::System::Email::Send] Error sending message
Dec  4 10:59:01 otrs OTRS-CGI-10[16653]: [Error][Kernel::System::Ticket::Article::ArticleSend][Line:2176]: Impossible to send message to: some.customer@example.com, .

So I went searching for possible culprits, and found a few references that it might be a filesystem problem. So I restarted the system and forced a fsck on the filesystem. It ran rather uneventfully (it didn't mention having to repair any blocks), and gave it a clean bill of health. None of the tickets seem to have any corruption (at least not so much that there's been any problems viewing the tickets).

We've yet to see any problems with new tickets sent in since the reboot, but old tickets continue to have this issue. Is there anything that can be suggested to correct these issues?

Thanks in advance!

[crythias]

Likely cause for *some* of this is bad email address (random comma?)

Bad file descriptor is *sometimes* related to [not] connecting via SSL, and if you can use a smarthost to handle email send, probably all the better.

[mcampbell]

Well, now that you mention it, I did think the comma & space to be a little bit odd... but I just had one of my support guys manually type out the email address in a new ticket, making sure that it did not contain the comma & space, and when it errored out, it had it in there as part of the message.

I went ahead and changed the SMTP settings in OTRS to SMTPS/port 465 from SMTP/port 25, still no dice.

[crythias]

viewtopic.php?f=81&t=16958

[mcampbell]

I changed the SMTP settings again to SMTPTLS this time, and emails that previously failed work now. I'm going to give it a grace period of a couple of days before I conclusively say it's fixed, but things are looking good. My hosted exchange provider is GoDaddy, and it seems that they must have mucked with their basic smtp settings to cause a problem such as this, since it had been working perfectly well for the last year or so...

[mcampbell]

This does appear to have been the problem. Thanks for your help Crythias!