GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 383618
Evolution does not deliver mail
Last modified: 2010-05-16 09:51:53 UTC
Please describe the problem: After one or two mail sent, Evolution refuses to send mail with the error: Error while performing operation. RCPT TO <xyz@somecorp.com> failed: Transaction failed Steps to reproduce: 1. send a mail or two 2. 3. Actual results: Mail fails to be delivered, and hangs around it Outbox. Expected results: The mail should be sent. Does this happen every time? Very often. In fact, it seems to happen on all mails sent an address outside my company. Other information: This is a very serious issue. Evolution is simply not usable as a MUA with this bug. We use postfix as out mail server. Sending mail from other mailers works perfect every time. Evolution used to work fine in FC5, it failed working after an update to FC6.
A network packet trace using Ethereal (Wireshark) when sending mails through Evolution and a working mailer for comparison would be useful. I had this problem when my corp mailserver started requiring TLS for corp-outbound mails but I apparently had evolution configured to use SSL not TLS.
It turns out that there was a configuration problem, and the reason why Evolution did not deliver any mail outside my domain was due to the fact that postfix was denying relaying from my machine. Now, this turned out to be a _much_ more serious problem than it needed be for two reasons: 1. There was no reasonable error message to suggest that the server was denying relaying, making it almost impossible for me to figure things out until I inspected the postfix server logs. 2. Once the relaying was denied, Evo would get into a strange mode whereas it can no longer be shutdown properly. It just grays out and remains like that indefinitely. The only out of this mess was restarting X, or going about hunting for evolution processes and kill(1)ing them. I still would consider the very unfriendly error handling a significant bug worth fixing.
(In reply to comment #2) > Evo would get into a strange > mode whereas it can no longer be shutdown properly. It just > grays out and remains like that indefinitely. The only out > of this mess was restarting X, or going about hunting for > evolution processes and kill(1)ing them. evolution --force-shutdown (from the shell) will kill other evolution and related processes without the need to restart X. That said, I agree that error reporting in evolution can be improved significantly. A better mechanism to show errors is a goal for 2.10, however, I don't know exactly what they have in mind. http://www.go-evolution.org/Evo2.10
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 502515 ***
uargh. sorry.
I ran across this almost identical bug in my later ver. 2.22.1 -- both in the fact that my Evolution client often sits on emails in the outbox (sending mail just throws up a dialog box but no mails go out), and in the way Evolution does not close when I command it to quit (just a grayed window where the app was, which does not close out). Looking over the bugzilla, I see that this bug is a year and a half old, but it has also not been triaged!! Isn't this an important enough issue for the developers to fix by now? This is the sort of annoyance that makes me ready to dump Evolution, which otherwise was outclassing Kmail and Thunderbird (the latter does not have the integration of address and calendaring; the former is too buggy and old-school). What good is an email client if you have to inspect the outbox every time to make sure your emails actually got out?
This version is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. The current stable GNOME and Evolution version is 2.30. Can you please check again whether this issue still happens in Evolution 2.28 or 2.30 and update this report by adding a comment and changing the "Version" field? Thanks a lot. Again thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed for the version you originally used here. Without feedback this report will be closed as INCOMPLETE in 6 weeks.
@Jorge, i think this bug is still open because error reporting should be improved. Reporter was able to solve the problem as he mentioned in comment#2
Closing this bug report as no further information has been provided. Please feel free to reopen this bug if you can provide the information asked for. Thanks!