CUNY Academic Commons

Boone,

Just a few quick questions before I get into trying to reproduce this.

In the headers posted in the description, there is a line in the middle:

From: CUNY Academic Commons <pcp@gc.cuny.edu>

Could this issue be something as simple as our email server having the "From:" attribute set to "CUNY Academic Commons?"

My thinking here is this: anyone who's setup multiple email accounts in a mail client (Mail, Outlook, etc) knows that when you're adding an account it asks for Name, Email and Password before moving on to port and server DNS settings. Whatever you enter in that Name field will show up on the receiver's end in their mail client's "From:" column. Could the mail server setup in the GC be causing sent mail from pcp@gc.cuny.edu to show up as being from "CUNY Academic Commons?" Maybe in the Sendmail config, if that's what we're using. Maybe we should add Andre as a watcher to see what he thinks?

Second, how exactly do I reproduce this in a local env? Obviously I haven't even tried yet, but won't I need to be running a mail server to replicate the plugin's conditions on our server?

Maybe we should add Andre as a watcher to see what he thinks?

I think I set him up as a watcher when I assigned the ticket. . . . André -- thoughts?

There's nothing on the mail server configuration presetting a "from:" header. I double-checked this by sending and email to myself directly from the server and the message correctly listed the user who sent it (in this case root).

Thanks André.

I just got a response from the developer on this issue (still not resolved, however).

Their advice was pretty much the same as Boone's—that there is likely a 3rd party plugin that is intercepting messages and overwriting the headers of mails sent through WP Mail. Buddypress codebase showed exactly this behavior happening (so that it overwrites "Wordpress" as the default sender) so that would be my first guess as to squashing this problem.

Thanks for letting us know, Keith. That's a helpful starting place.

Dom:

Second, how exactly do I reproduce this in a local env? Obviously I haven't even tried yet, but won't I need to be running a mail server to replicate the plugin's conditions on our server?

Yes. But if that's too much trouble, either use cdev, or just dump the contents of the $phpmailer object to the screen before it gets sent (wp-includes/pluggable.php, the wp_mail() function)

Good find, Dom. I agree that the following lines are probably the root of the issue:

    add_filter( 'wp_mail_from', 'cets_nbd_from_email' );
    add_filter( 'wp_mail_from_name', 'cets_nbd_from_name' );

The inline doc says that the purpose is "the bonus options". Would you mind looking deeper to see what this function is intended to do? I want to have a sense of why it was originally put in there before disabling it altogether.

I'm on it.

I saw that 1.4.9 was released, but it seems that this bug is still persistent in emails sent as recently as 2 minutes ago.

Does it take some time before the latest release actually propogates to CAC? Or is this persistence indicative of some other problem? Perhaps a lingering database entry or cache blob?

Thanks everyone for your work troubleshooting this annoying bug!

Looks like BuddyPress is causing this.

I'm not sure how the Tribulant Mailing List plugin is coded as I don't have access to this, but what I would try to do is hook onto the 'wp_mail' filter and check to see if the 'From' email header is set. If it is, we should unhook BP's 'wp_mail_from_name' filter.

Ray, Boone,

First, Ray, thanks for chiming in on this issue. I appreciate the help. I have verified that commenting out bp_core_email_from_name_filter() on line 57 of bp-core-filters.php does indeed remove "CUNY Academic Commons" from the ["FomeName"] element of the PHP Mailer object when I dump it after submitting an announcement (which is how I've been debugging this issue). That "FromName" element reverts back to the default: "WordPress." Which gets set on line 336 of pluggable.php.

As I mentioned above, when I first started debugging this issue I added echo var_dump( $phpmailer ) . "<br /><br />"; to the wp_mail() function right after do_action_ref_array( 'phpmailer_init', array( &$phpmailer ) ); so I could "see" the mail object as I started commenting things out one by one (no local mail server configured).

To try out your idea I decided to add a new function to the end of cac-functions.php right after Boone's function that removed the CETS Blog Defaults filters. Here's what I started with:

/**
 * Some third party plugins need to set the "From Name" email header with their own name.
 * Don't let BP override that email header if it's already set.
 *
 * @see http://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/2152
 */
function cac_mail_from_name_bypass( $phpmailer ) {
    if ( $phpmailer->FromName ) {
        remove_filter( 'wp_mail_from_name', 'bp_core_email_from_name_filter' );
        echo var_dump( $phpmailer ) . "<br /><br />";
    }
}
add_action( 'phpmailer_init', 'cac_mail_from_name_bypass' );

That function dumps the $phpmailer object to my screen when I submit a new announcement from a test group I've been using in my local env. However, the remove_filter() does not affect the "FromName" element. It remains "CUNY Academic Commons." I'm pretty sure I know why: I'm WAY off on my "timing" - by the time phpmailer_init fires, all the filters have been applied. What I don't know at this point is when/where to inject remove_filter() so that it gets rid of that BP filter at the right time.

I added a second function to test out an idea and it worked:

function cac_mail_from_name_bypass2() {
    remove_filter( 'wp_mail_from_name', 'bp_core_email_from_name_filter' );
}
add_action( 'bp_loaded', 'cac_mail_from_name_bypass2' );

Of course, this just removes that filter across the board. This would definitely fix the issue, but I don't think it's what we want. So I'm left stuck in the middle - wondering where to inject the code so it doesn't overwrite the FromName when used by the Tribulent Newsletter plugin. I feel like I'm in a chicken-and-egg situation, we don't know what will be in the $phpmailer object until it's populated by a plugin, but by the time that occurs the BP filter has already been applied. Does that make sense? It also doesn't help matters that the Newsletter plugin is sending through cron, so removing the filter and dumping in my local env could end up working but then fail on the live site because the cron job is firing at a different point then the filters we identify. The plugin api is powerful, but really annoying sometimes! :-)

P.S. - I'm also a little confused by your advice above to "check to see if the 'From' email header is set." Won't it always be set?

I actually just saw a forum post on the BuddyPress forums that has the same problem with BP being too greedy with Gravity Forms!

P.S. - I'm also a little confused by your advice above to "check to see if the 'From' email header is set." Won't it always be set?

I'm making a guess that Tribulant might have used the fourth parameter in wp_mail() to add their custom 'From' header. If they did, this will actually make things easier to code a workaround. If they didn't, then it's a little harder.

If BuddyPress used the fourth parameter in wp_mail(), we wouldn't run into this issue. (I'll have to make a note of this, so we can fix this in BP.) But for now, is it possible for someone to send me the Tribulant plugin so I can see where we might be able to write a workaround?

Dom, the other approach we can take is to use your disable BuddyPress email filter for all sub-sites that are not the main CAC site. This will ensure that sub-sites like Keith's will work the way they want it to.

Probably try something like this:

function cac_mail_from_name_bypass() {
    global $blog_id;

    // do not remove the email filter if we're on the main BP site
    if ( $blog_id == BP_ROOT_BLOG )
        return;

    remove_filter( 'wp_mail_from_name', 'bp_core_email_from_name_filter' );
}
add_action( 'bp_loaded', 'cac_mail_from_name_bypass' );

Note: Untested! :)

The negatives with this approach is this doesn't fix things if we decide to use a plugin like Tribulant or Gravity Forms on the main CAC site. But, I think this will probably not happen (for now anyway!).

Ray,

First, thanks again for the help with this. I've looked through the code you referenced both above and the in the email you sent. I kinda see why the fourth argument is important to this issue. It allows custom headers to be set when using wp_mail(). What I'm still not putting together is why that makes it easier for us? Does it make it easier to check and correct the From: header? Does it open up other filtering abilities? Deep inside the filters is still where I get utterly lost. :-)

I also see what you're referring to with Tribulent using the fourth argument when not using Gmail or SMTP, since the code is in the 'else' block. I looked back at the headers in this issue's description and it looks like we're using SMTP.

...
smtp.mail=pcp@gc.cuny.edu
...
by proofsender.gc.cuny.edu (8.13.8/8.13.8) with ESMTP id q8S8jXNa009893
...
(172.29.28.89) with Microsoft SMTP Server id 8.3.279.1; Fri, 28 Sep 2012

So it looks like we won't be able to take advantage of the fact that Tribulent is using the fourth argument?

Second, I started to try and test out the snippet you included above until I realized that I've been testing the output in a test group by submitting announcements and reviewing the headers from the $phpmailer dump, which of course won't work because the code checks if I'm running the root blog! :-)

I'm wondering if we should just include this code in 1.4.10 to see if it "patches" this issue. We can then move this to 1.4.11 for further discussion? I don't think the above code could really break anything, but as you said, it is untested.

Boone, please let me (us) know what you think. I can throw this in at the last minute and then we can ask Keith if he's seeing a difference in his newsletters.

This issue seems to be resolved finally.

Thanks to all involved!

Excellent. great work, all, and many thanks.

Glad to hear everything's working. I just updated a forum in our project planning group to make sure everything still looks right from the root blog.

This was in the 'From' field when I received the notification email:

CUNY Academic Commons <wordpress@commons.gc.cuny.edu>

Does that look right to everyone? It does to me.

Does that look right to everyone? It does to me.

Would we want to use something like no-reply@commons.gc.cuny.edu or no-reply@gc.cuny.edu instead?