Blank e-mails occasionally sent on forms set to send to multiple people?

[dethompsOWU2]

We've been having a strange problem and, apparently, it has been ongoing and nobody bothered to tell me until today.

It appears that, for all forms who have a "submission summary" e-mail set up to send out to multiple recipients, there are occasional blank e-mails that get sent out that say they are from "Apache" (our Web server).

For all forms who only have a single recipient for "submission summary" e-mails, this problem doesn't happen.

Now, I can walk people through how to filter incoming messages out and automatically delete these messages, but I'm wondering if there is a bug or incorrect setting on my end or something that might be causing this issue?

Any ideas?

Doug Thompson
Manager of Web and Electronic Communications
Ohio Wesleyan University

[Ben]

Hi Doug,

Hmmm! That's no good.

Two things:
- Are you using the Swift Mailer module, or the built-in email functionality? (PHP mail()). If the latter, I'd strongly recommending switching to configure it with SMTP. PHP mail() is pretty dreadful: something like this wouldn't shock me.

- Would it be possible for you to email me the raw email content for the blank email (ben.keen@gmail.com)? If not, take a look at it yourself and see if anything looks unusual in the to or cc headers. Or even, check if your server logs the emails being sent out. If it does, check for errors and even the content being sent. That may well help track the problem down.

It sounds like there's something wrong with the generated headers, but I'd like to look at the raw content to actually see.

- Ben

[dethompsOWU2]

While I have root access to our Web server, I'm not knowledgeable enough to know where to look to find the info that the Swift Mailer module would need (SMTP server, port, type of authentication, etc.) in order to function properly.

Since I'm using FormTools for a bunch (most) of our online forms, I'd hate to "break" the e-mail forms trying to figure out the right info by guessing at it, you know?

Is there a particular config file or Webmin or some other thing that I should look at to determine the info that the Swift Mailer module needs?

[dethompsOWU2]

After some searching/reading, I took a gamble and just put in "localhost" as my SMTP server in the SwiftMailer config screen, and then did a test send. It <appears> that it works fine. I then went into an actual form's email configuration and did a test send from there, and <that> appears to work fine as well.

So, I'm hoping this means that the switch to SwiftMailer worked properly <and> (hopefully) resolved the blank Apache messages at the same time.