[Popcon-developers] Bug#741104: Bug#741104: popularity-contest: Silently fails to send anything if no MTA configured

[Bill Allombert]

On Sun, Mar 20, 2016 at 11:49:34AM +0100, Francesco Poli wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Oct 2014 22:10:20 +0200 Bill Allombert wrote:
> 
> Hello Bill,
> I use popularity-contest on most Debian boxes I administer and I have
> experienced this issue where the MTA is configured to only deal with
> local mail.

Please do not hijack other people bug report...

> On one such system, I get the bounce basically once a week.
> Since I haven't changed the default configuration of
> popularity-contest, this means that the HTTP method almost always fails
> and the SMTP method is tried (in vain). Do I understand correctly?

The problem addressed in this bug report is that popcon is assuming that if
/usr/sbin/sendmail report success, then the email will be delivered, so
it marks the submission as successful and do not resend it again.

> Please note that the system is not up and running 24/7, and uses
> anacron: hence, the HTTP method is not tried always at the same time.
> Nonetheless, it seems to almost always fail!   :-(

Do you know why ? Is the network available already when anacron run ?
If you cannot report neither by HTTP nor by SMTP, then there is little
way for popcon to work.

> Is there any progress on the fix you are working on?

This is a different bug report: #709892
The server was changed to be able to handle load more efficiently and the
client part (in testing/unstable) use a randomized report time to spread
the load.

> Questions:
>  • what would happen, if I added
>    MAILTO=
>    to /etc/popularity-contest.conf?

Then SMTP will not be attempted and the submission will be marked as
failed and will be retried the next day.

Thanks for using popularity-contest!
-- 
Bill. <ballombe at debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.