Email notifications: deleted or moved posts

[Ildhund]

I got this notification from the Indesign forum this morning:

From: John Boyden

Date: 07 August 2009 03:53

orums.adobe.com/community/general/forum_comments]. The mod there collects bugs and this one sounds juicy.

Since I didn't get notification of my reply, I visited the forum to see what had happened, and there's no sign of either post. I suppose the OP might have deleted it - although he might have waited a few more hours before changing his mind. Or a mod might have done so since it was OT for the forum it was posted in. Either way, it's a frustrating business for someone who goes to the trouble of responding, and I don't think it would be too difficult for the forum to bounce a message like mine straight away with a note that the message I was responding to has been deleted. If it's been moved, then the response should follow it.

Noel

[MichaelKazlow]

I don't think it would be too difficult for the forum to bounce a message like mine straight away with a note that the message I was responding to has been deleted. If it's been moved, then the response should follow it.

You are assuming both a well designed and well implemented forum. Both assumptions might be unwarranted.

[Jochem van Dieten]

When a thread is moved to a new location and you have email post permissions in that new location (both post permissions and are subscribed to it), email replies should work.

When a thread is locked or deleted, you should get a reply to your email telling you that your message was not added. That last part currently does not work. This was reported as a bug to Jive on April 10th. Jive scheduled the bugfix for CS-13407 for the 2.5.13 release in June. I can see in the Jive bugtracker it has not been fixed yet and is not scheduled for the August or September releases either.

I parked your other messages about this. Are you having problems with the (in)famous repeatedemail big?

[Ildhund]

Looks like it. This is what happened:

I used my client's 'forward' function to copy my original message (the one that never showed because the OP had been deleted or moved), added my comments and sent it to this forum at 10.14 UTC. When it still hadn't appeared several hours later (my posts typically show up within five or ten minutes), I surmised that the forum didn't like the 'Fw:' in the subject line. So I edited my sent post and sent it again at 16.20 UTC. This one finally showed up garbled at 22.54 UTC, and now looks to be repeating. There is clearly a trigger in the message that causes Jive to omit part of it, and the SDA syndrome kicks in. This is what my message looked like, with the excised part in red:

I thought the possibility that the upgrade to 10.5.8 with Safari 4.02 might cause problems for forum users could be interesting.

Can you identify the trigger, so that I know to avoid it in the future?

Sorry to cause so much bother.

Noel

[Jochem van Dieten]

OK, I'll kill any further repetitions when they come in. That should only last for 2 more days since Jive changed the configuration of the email queue.

Not sure on the trigger for the repetition, but the trigger for the display issues in the use of square brackets. Jive has officially removed support for Wiki syntax from the system, but they didn't actually remove the code. Fix was scheduled for July by Jive, but will be in September at the earliest. And then we still have to wait for Adobe to update.

[Ildhund]

Not sure on the trigger for the repetition, but the trigger for the display issues in the use of square brackets.

I'm not sure about that: I've used the [Title|URL] format before without problems, and it should be OK according to Kanguyen's instructions.

Jive has officially removed support for Wiki syntax from the system,

Does that mean that the instructions above will no longer apply when the update comes?

I have noticed that high-ASCII characters can be troublesome, and there's an e-umlaut in there. I'm using UTF-8 as character encoding and Uuencode as transfer encoding; should I be using something else?

Thanks,

Noel

(Two examples of square brackets in there - the first ones inside pre tags, the next ones not.)

[Jochem van Dieten]

[Title|URL] is fine. That is actually common syntax between Wiki syntax and BBML. But the [InDesign] from your email is not a valid keyword, yet the system thinks it needs to process the instruction because it is between the square brackets. So it ends up doing something that is rarely the intended thing. Same happens when you are using any other word between the square brackets that the system doesn't recognize.

I don't know what Jive intends to do about it. There seems to be a pretty big conflict between using an i between square brackets to indicate italic and a using it to indicate an array index in a programming language. Whichever way they choose to handle it, they are not going to be ble to make everybody happy.

With wierd email issues in the DATA phase character sets are always the primary suspect. But in this case that doesn't make sense because Jive put a check for duplicates in ClearSpace after the code that deals with character sets. And ClearSpace is Java so if anything Unicode is the preferred character encoding. I need to think on the UUencoding. Have repeating messages happened before?

[Ildhund]

Have repeating messages happened before?

Yes, I had an infamous repeating thread in the Testing forum a few weeks ago, which got me banned from posting there ever again. I suppose because it was an OP and not a reply, the whole thread started reproducing itself. And now I look at it again, I see the same 'oversight' on my part. I had forwarded an earlier message that didn't show up, and of course the quoted subject line included the forum name in square brackets. So there may be a connection there. I'm still looking for a simple list of things to avoid when posting to these forums by email.(1)

That is actually common syntax between Wiki syntax and BBML.

I'm sorry to say I haven't the faintest idea what that means. I'll have to do some googling.

Noel

(1) Once in a while, I get blank email notifications in other forums. A mod may chirp in with something like 'the forum doesn't like your email client; please use the web interface to post.' That would stop me from posting altogether, I think. I've taken to replying to blank messages using this sort of formulation:

Your message, presumably submitted by email, was blank.

A couple of things to beware of when posting to Adobe forums by email:

* A line containing 'wrote:' (and perhaps variants of this) will be removed along with anything below it
* anything following a string of five underscore characters will be removed
* brackets other than curved parentheses (i.e. square, curly or angle) will have unexpected consequences.

Prefixing a paragraph with a 'greater than' symbol and a space will cause it to appear in a 'quote' box. Some other formatting possibilities are given at
http://forums.adobe.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/2024949-10091/Text%20Markup%20Syntax%20Help.htm

It would be good if JC and/or the mods could agree on a suitably simple accurate formulation like that to use as a reply to blank posts. It ought to be easy, but it's probably asking too much for something of the sort to be put (prominently) at the foot of the first email notification a new user gets.

Just a thought.

N

[Jochem van Dieten]

You shouldn't be banned for something you can't help. If this happens again with a new thread, just unsubscribe from the notifications for that specific forum. When you don't have a subscription you are not allowed to start threads and you will end up receiving the bounces for 48 hours, after which you can enable your subscription again. In theory of course

I'll ping JC about getting the ban lifted.

Adding a disclaimer to the first email notification is not possible, it would be added to all of them. I'll see if I can write something for the FAQ and whether Adobe is willing to add a link to that in the footer of all notifications.

[Jochem van Dieten]

1. You should no longer be banned (if you ever were).

2. FAQ has been updated. Email messages not (yet).

3. Repeating email issue (and all other isses caused by MIME headers / charsets) should be fixed. (Jive already had the fix in testing, I just had a nice set of textcases to verify their fix.)

[Ildhund]

Brilliant. I'll do some tests over the weekend (try and break it!).

As regards the ban, see what John did. The last time I tried (a week or two ago), I got a 'You don't have permission to do whatever you were trying to do' notice.

Thanks for all your efforts to improve the forums.

Noel

[Ildhund]

1. You should no longer be banned (if you ever were).

My posts as Ildhund don't get through, but !Firedog's do. I'll let you know if and when I get an NDR.

I just posted a link in the Indesign forum in the [Title|http://URL.com] form and it appeared just as I'd sent it. Does this mean that the formatting codes we were given no longer work?

Noel

[Ildhund]

1. You should no longer be banned (if you ever were).

Here's what I get if I try and start a new discussion in Testing:

So my read-only status still applies.

Noel

[Jochem van Dieten]

Ildhund wrote:

So my read-only status still applies.

Please try again.

[Ildhund]

I did and it worked.

Thank you.

Noel

[Phillip_M_Jones]

I am going to ask a question that may or may not be related to what you just said here:jochemd wrote:

OK, I'll kill any further repetitions when they come in. That should only last for 2 more days since Jive changed the configuration of the email queue.

Not sure on the trigger for the repetition, but the trigger for the display issues in the use of square brackets. Jive has officially removed support for Wiki syntax from the system, but they didn't actually remove the code. Fix was scheduled for July by Jive, but will be in September at the earliest. And then we still have to wait for Adobe to update

I am going to ask a question that may be related sto the above quoted information above.

for the past few days I have been getting the sensation of reading over and over the same thread. It appears I've been getting email notices for some threads that I have read the day before or the the day before that.

Could this be related to the email Que Config change?

[Jochem van Dieten]

No, that is unrelated.

If you have actually received multiple notifications instead of re-reading the same notification a second time, please start a new thread and attach some examples of duplicate notifications. Mak sure those examples include all the mail headers so we can see where the multiplication happens. For instructions on how to get the full headers see http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/19.html

[Phillip_M_Jones]

Okay next time it happens will do so.  Thanks!

[Ildhund]

When a thread is locked or deleted, you should get a reply to your email telling you that your message was not added. That last part currently does not work.

OK.

I just got the bounce NDR for my original message. The OP has DTS 070809 10:15, the NDR 090809 10.43, so just two days later - as you once said you had asked for. Still, I can't help thinking that this is particularly unhelpful and ought to be improved. An email poster doesn't get notifications of his own posts. It's quite unacceptable that he has no idea until two days later that his post didn't make it because of some formatting glitch. Many of the forums have pretty fast-moving traffic and two days is a long time to sit around and decide that no-one's going to respond, only to find out that the question was never asked.

And the NDR says

450 Problem attempting to execute commands. Please try again later. (in reply to end of DATA command)

which indicates that I ought to send the message again and hope for better luck. That NDR should have told me that this was a permanent error because my message was malformed in the recipient's view and no amount of re-sending would get it to its destination.

Noel

[Jochem van Dieten]

Ildhund wrote:

I just got the bounce NDR for my original message. The OP has DTS 070809 10:15, the NDR 090809 10.43, so just two days later - as you once said you had asked for. Still, I can't help thinking that this is particularly unhelpful and ought to be improved.

I agree. Adobe has been aware of the problem and it is under investigation since at least the beginning of May. Jive has been aware of the problem for much longer, at least since March. I can not explain the lack of progress in solving this issue in any other way then indifference on the side of Adobe and Jive. You have seen how I had to go directly to Jive to get at least some partial improvement. You can see in the commit history of Jive version control how Jive is at best doing a little bit every other month. Apparently that is the way it is and for all of us that is a take it or leave it situation.

I want to try something. Can you get me a copy of both the message you sent and the bounce you received, including full headers. Please obfuscate anything you want to keep private, because most likely the whole thing will end up in public.

[Ildhund]

Here you are. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help.

Noel

(I would have sent this via PM, but apparently PMs can't have attachments...)

[Jochem van Dieten]

Got it. I already used it to reproduce the repeating email bug in a private forum. I should be able to isolate the trigger in a few days.

[Ildhund]

Good man.

Just so it's quite clear: the message whose headers you got is not the one that's repeating. It never got delivered, quite possibly because the recipient server's spam filter rejects messages whose subject line starts with 'Fw:' (in which case the NDR should say so). The one that's repeating is identical apart from the subject line, so if the trigger is in the message body, you're on the right track.

Noel

[Ildhund]

The plot thickens, but now I can see what's happening. I just got a delivery report for the repeating post, 48 hours after I sent it. The DR says:

X-Postfix; lost connection with 10.137.24.42 while sending end of data -- message may be sent more than once

but then you'd guessed that, right?

I'll attach the DR for your delectation.

Noel

[Jochem van Dieten]

Gettiing the same one in my reproductions.

The first part of the puzzle seems pretty straightforward. Unless email messages are MIME messages, they are only allowe to use ASCII 0-127. Your message is not a MIME message, yet it has a character outside that range (the ë from your name). So the mail message that is sent to Jive is incorrect, and ClearSpace breaks in various and creative ways on that message. More on that later part of the puzzle later.