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February 09, 2012, 09:15:53 PM

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Author Topic: Zen Cart store not sending large email orders -- host configuration issue?  (Read 883 times)
dbrewster
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« on: July 20, 2006, 08:51:51 AM »
I've been running my Zen Cart store on Lunarpages since Aug. 2005.

Since May (possibly before that) we have seen a pattern of email notification and confirmation not being sent out when the order is large, 10 lines of items or more.

There is no setting in ZC to restrict the size of an email. I am using sendmail email transport method. The order is correctly and fully recorded in the database. In the cases where email is not sent, the gateway processor, Authorize.net, does not always receive a complete itemization, either. It does receive the order total, so it does complete the processing.

When an email does not get sent, the next order, even if it is small, doesn't get sent, either. Which makes me think that this could be some kind of buffer setting on our server, Exodus.

Any information about what could be causing this problem?

Should I be using sendmail-f?

No other Zen Cart users are reporting this problem. I am fairly active on their boards.
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=40929

Thanks for your guidance.

---Diana
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MrPhil
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« Reply #1 on: July 20, 2006, 10:41:44 AM »
Just a random thought... I don't use a canned ecommerce cart myself.

Is the entire order being disrupted, or just the e-mail part? Look at all the <form> tags in your code that you have access to.

Does ZC give you a choice of GET or POST method in the <form> setup? I seem to recall that GET (which places the data in the URL query string) has a fairly small limit, while POST permits much larger amounts of data. If ZC gives you a choice, and you're currently using method="GET", try method="POST" and see if it makes any difference. That's the only thing I can think of that would be sensitive to order size.

Good luck! Phil
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dbrewster
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« Reply #2 on: July 20, 2006, 11:11:12 AM »
Thanks for the suggestion, but these are php forms, and they work well 99% of the time. There is no loss of data, it's all written to the database correctly.

Another piece of information: the condition is intermittent. I've seen 11 item orders come through just fine, but some 7 item orders fail.

I never see a small order fail to send in email.

That's why I'm wondering whether I should be using sendmail -f? LP admins? I may need to take this to individual customer support, since I can only guess that there's something in the server configuration that is messing with sendmail?

---Diana
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MrPhil
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« Reply #3 on: July 20, 2006, 03:53:51 PM »
Quote
but these are php forms, and they work well 99% of the time

Actually, there's no such thing as a "PHP form". PHP is a language used to create HTML <form>s on the server and send them to your browser. If you look at the resulting page (something like View>Page Source), you ought to see one or more <form> sections. There will be a method= GET or POST attribute within the <form> tag. It's possible that some forms are using POST for database updates, and other parts GET for email dispatch -- and the GET ones are having trouble?

Quote
I've seen 11 item orders come through just fine, but some 7 item orders fail.

Is there any rhyme and reason to which emails fail? Is there a linear relationship between the number of items and the amount of data in the URL query string? If not, could the failing 7-item orders have large amounts of data while some 11-item orders have small amounts? If the forms are using GET and the failing items have significantly more URL query string data than the those which work, that might be it. Otherwise, no idea.

Phil
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dbrewster
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« Reply #4 on: July 21, 2006, 06:45:54 AM »
Thanks for the suggestion, but if this were the case it would be affecting many other ZC users, and it is not. It would also have been affecting us prior to a couple of months ago, and it has not. We always received email quite reliably, for all orders.

ZC is a quite sophisticated and well developed shopping cart application.
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dbrewster
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« Reply #5 on: July 27, 2006, 07:51:46 AM »
Eureka!

The upgrade of Zen Cart 1.2.7 --> 1.3.0.x changed the email script. Encoding used to be "quotable-printable" and was changed to "8bit". While 8bit was fine for webmail servers, such as Yahoo mail, it was choking our Exchange server, although the server was configured for 1000 char lines.

So, I have changed that configuration in Zen Cart, and it seems to have fixed the problem.
See includes/classes/class.phpmailer.php

In my private support dialogue with various LP support people, noone told me the correct location of sendmail error logs. For future reference, they are in a file named "inbox" in the Mail folder, in the root directory. These errors are *not* part of regular server stat logging. You can read that file with a good code editor such as PSPad, and see accurate line length and complete headers. Very useful for debugging.

I hope this information helps someone else some day!

---Diana
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