[Evergreen-general] Hold emails appear to not be working

[Chris Sharp]

Hi Jon,

On Fri, Jun 7, 2024 at 11:19 PM JonGeorg SageLibrary via Evergreen-general <
evergreen-general at list.evergreen-ils.org> wrote:

> Greetings. I have two libraries that have noticed that hold emails have
> not been going out the last couple days. One of the libraries was able to
> send me specific patron info and I was able to query the db and verify that
> no hold emails went out for those patrons. I do see other emails going out
> from the system via the mail.log on the server, so the mail server is up
> and working.
>

The table to pay attention to is action_trigger.event and you'll want to
filter that by the event_def (ids are in action_trigger.event_definition).
Any event rows in a state other than "pending" or "invalid" should be
investigated.


>
> I did have an issue where the log server ran out of space and I had to
> reboot it after clearing space, however I have been able to verify that
> hold emails went out after that, so that should not be an issue, but it is
> the only unusual recent event for our system that I'm aware of. Email
> receipts are working as expected, included among the patrons I know did not
> receive hold email notifications.
>
> I've checked syslog for CRON jobs, for such things as hold_targeter.pl,
> action_trigger_runner.pl, thaw_expired_frozen_holds.srfsh, and I don't
> see any errors and all CRON jobs appear to be running and finishing
> successfully.
>

How are you checking this?  I enable a mail client on the server and crons
should generate mail to the crontab owner if they fail (or generate any
output at all).  You can also relay these to something external (like an
admin at yourlibrary.org email address).

I would start with the theory that action_trigger_runner.pl is indeed
failing.  This can happen if the server running it has insufficient RAM.
Other possibilities we've encountered are 1) there's a bad template, and
the OpenSRF logs should tell you that and/or 2) the action_trigger_runner.pl
process generates a "too large" message for EJabberD to handle and EJabberD
dies off (and/or the OpenSRF listener dies off).


>
> I've also checked the mail.log file and do not see any entries for these
> patrons regarding their holds which makes sense as there is no entry in the
> db, but I do see email receipts. I do see a ton of 'Network is unreachable'
> errors related to gmail and other providers, but that is a separate issue
> and likely a reason to consider a 3rd party application to handle
> notifications.
>

Yes, I think eventually our notification methods will have to change or
we're all going to have to go to third-party services. :-/



>
> Is it possible that there is a backlog of stuck hold emails like what
> happens when the reporter gets stuck? Is there a way to force the hold
> email function to stop and restart, perhaps in the database itself? I've
> restarted all services on all servers [minus the db servers] without
> resolution.
>

More likely that this is happening at the Evergreen (Action/Trigger)
level.  If other emails are working as expected, I would work under the
assumption that the problem is not with email itself.


Hope that's helpful!


-- 

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Chris Sharp, PINES System Administrator

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Georgia Public Library Service

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