Email to Ticket Best Practices

psiiota

@johnny @wrongecho Looking for some guidance on how everyone has Email to Ticket setup.

We use M365, and therefore are not able to connect to ITFlow. We are getting around this with a gmail account that is receiving forwarded emails.

It seems that the cron is getting stuck, as when I try to run the file from the CLI, it prints that the lock file exists.

I assume it is getting stuck making a Folder in Gmail, as I do not see any new folders, nor a way to make new folders.

What is everyone else doing?

johnny

hey @psiiota

Try this:

Disable the cron mailer from automatically running, temporarily delete the itflow lock files in /tmp *.lock
then run cron_mailer from the command line and see what happens.

psiiota

Looks like it ran just fine. See output below:
root@portal:~# sudo -u www-data php /var/www/portal.twe.tech/cron_ticket_email_parser.php 2Cm2zJtHsYKv1Maxjvvq

Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Failed to process email - flagging for manual review.Created new ticket.<br>root@portal:~#

Any ideas on how to check what may be causing the issue with cron?

johnny

First and foremost, verify that there are no existing lock files in the /tmp directory.
Schedule the PHP mailer in cron to execute every minute.
Observe its performance to ensure it operates without any issues.

The underlying principle is as follows: Whenever the cron mailer is triggered, it generates a lock file. Once its task is complete, this file is removed. This mechanism ensures that there are no overlapping executions of the cron mailer, which could lead to duplicate operations. However, if an interruption occurs mid-process, such as a system crash, the lock file may not be deleted.

There's also a potential race condition to be aware of: If the server shuts down or restarts while the cron mailer is still active, the lock file might not get deleted. This can be particularly problematic if the /tmp directory isn't cleared upon a system reboot.

wrongecho

johnny

We really need to add some logic to time-out the lock file after X mins.

psiiota

Deleting the lock file did it! Many thanks.

johnny

I like that idea @wrongecho

So basically when cron mailer executes it checks to see if a lock file is present but we should also check to see if the lock file is more than x mins old and if it is, delete it and continue and maybe log it in the audit log maybe something like stale lock file present, so we know how often and when it happens

johnny

@wrongecho and @psiiota

This should automatically fix the issue with Cron Email Parser and Cron Mail Queue being locked

Lock files will be removed if the lock is older than 10 mins and will be logged in the audit log under log entity cron

itflow-org/itflowc30e0f7

johnny

Also log if cron mail parser or queue attempted to run while it was already executing.

itflow-org/itflowf9d3d3b

psiiota

Now we are getting an issue where some emails are coming in blank. Already verified it is not an HTML email. Have either of you seen this? @johnny @wrongecho

wrongecho

psiiota

Interesting, so the email is entirely plain text? Can you review the source of the message to confirm?

wrongecho

psiiota

Did you ever get to the bottom of this?

psiiota

No, havent had time. Had 2 production servers go down this week 🙄

johnny

When you say production servers do you mean ITFlow production servers?

psiiota

NO, haha. Client's servers. Finally have time to spin up a dev env again.

johnny

psiiota ah Gochya hahaha - well anyway let us know about the email we are curious.