SMTP out not working. Encoding conversion failure.

bbryant

Just upgraded from 15.0 to 16.0. Had some problems with plugins but those have been resolved after some intense googling and a bit of elbow grease (Maybe worth mentioning somewhere that LDAP will not work on 16.0 with php8 unless you go pull the source and compile yourself 😅 gave me quite a bit of grief until I found the git commit that implied as much).

I can't seem to find anything regarding this error though, and I assume its likely got something to do with my instance in particular and some unknown gremlins in my update process. It does not appear that the problem is actually with SMTP, but rather some kind of encoding conversion in the to address.

Here's a truncated error I'm receiving:
[php:error] [pid 72952] [client 192.168.131.7:34132] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught ValueError: mb_convert_encoding(): Argument #2 ($to_encoding) must be a valid encoding, "localhost" given in /usr/local/www/apache24/data/osticket/include/class.charset.php:64 Stack trace: #0 /usr/local/www/apache24/data/osticket/include/class.charset.php(64): mb_convert_encoding('bbryant', 'localhost', 'ISO-8859-1')

I can provide more if needed, but it would seem to me that this is the crux of it. the second arg being passed to mb_convert_encoding is 'localhost' and from what I've gleaned from the php docs it's supposed to be a text format type along the lines of 'UTF-8'. I'd gladly go fix the problem myself if I knew where that 'localhost' was coming from, but I can't seem to figure it out. Assistance would be greatly appreciated. Not a super fatal error by any means, just prevents SMTP and forces the user out to a scary blank page when they submit, but the tickets still show up in the system and everything else appears to work. Any and all assistance is greatly appreciated! 😁

bbryant

Small update:
I've been playing around with things. Not too scared of going into php files and making changes myself. I was able to work around the issue by going into 'include/pear/Mail.php' on line 255 and changing it from this:
$addresses = Mail_Parse::parseAddressList($recipients, 'localhost', false);
to this:
$addresses = Mail_Parse::parseAddressList($recipients, 'UTF-8', false);

That is surely not the right way to do things 😆 (if it's stupid and it works it's not stupid right?)

Would still like some more information as to just why exactly this is happening and why the charset being passed to parseAddressList is hard coded as 'localhost'. Probably just some stuff I don't yet understand about php or something. Or maybe an erronius regex replace by the upgrade script based on an ENV var the was not there/misconfigured? I'm running on Freebsd 12.3 if that means anything to anyone but I assume that is largely immaterial. No idea what to make of this right now frankly 😅

It's become clear to me that the rest of the stack trace might be useful after going through it all myself. Also nothing sensitive for me to redact which is why i usually truncate logs like this when posting on forums. Here's the full stack trace:

Fri Feb 11 09:51:07.605551 2022] [php:error] [pid 72952] [client 192.168.131.7:34132] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught ValueError: mb_convert_encoding(): Argument #2 () must be a valid encoding, localhost given in /usr/local/www/apache24/data/osticket/include/class.charset.php:64 Stack trace: #0 /usr/local/www/apache24/data/osticket/include/class.charset.php(64): mb_convert_encoding('bbryant', 'localhost', 'ISO-8859-1') #1 /usr/local/www/apache24/data/osticket/include/class.format.php(60): Charset::transcode('bbryant', 'ISO-8859-1', 'localhost') #2 /usr/local/www/apache24/data/osticket/include/class.mailparse.php(584): Format::mimedecode('bbryant', 'localhost') #3 /usr/local/www/apache24/data/osticket/include/pear/Mail.php(255): Mail_Parse::parseAddressList('bbryant@lmtribu...', 'localhost', false) #4 /usr/local/www/apache24/data/osticket/include/pear/Mail/smtp.php(291): Mail->parseRecipients('bbryant@lmtribu...') #5 /usr/local/www/apache24/data/osticket/include/class.mailer.php(587): Mail_smtp->send('bbryant@lmtribu...', Array, '--=_cc056d31b7a...') #6 /usr/local/www/apache24/data/osticket/include/class.email.php(190): Mailer->send(Array, 'osTicket test e...', '<p>aasdf</p>', Array, Array) #7 /usr/local/www/apache24/data/osticket/scp/emailtest.php(38): Email->send('bbryant@lmtribu...', 'osTicket test e...', '<p>aasdf</p>', NULL, Array) #8 {main} thrown in /usr/local/www/apache24/data/osticket/include/class.charset.php on line 64, referer: https://help.lmtribune.com/scp/emailtest.php

KevinTheJedi

@bbryant

The plugins have already been updated on our website with PHP 8 support.

Please post the full stack trace as I need to see where the issue is originating from.

Edit:
I see the stacktrace now, spam checker flagged it for some reason.

Cheers.

KevinTheJedi

@bbryant

Interesting, I cannot replicate this issue using Apache, PHP 8.0, MySQL 8, and v1.16.

Try applying the following and see if they resolve your issue:

Note: The above will be included in the next maintenance release.

Cheers.

bbryant

No dice 🙁

I reverted my change and applied all the changes in those commits but I still get the same stack trace.

Having looked back at the history of that file 'localhost' has been the hard coded argument in that place for quite some time now, and presumably was when it was working on version 15.0 as well. I might be barking up the wrong tree entirely with this but its just strikes me as so strange that it is passing localhost in that spot instead of a charset name.

Another thing that I noticed is that in the include/class.mailparse.php this line suggests that after include/Mail.php passes 'localhost' as the second arg to parseAddressList, it would presumably redefine the $charset variable anyway

Line 564:
static function parseAddressList($address, $charset='UTF-8')

If my php knowledge is still any good, that means as it passed up through include/class.format.php into the mb_convert_encoding statement in include/class.charset.php it's value should be UTF-8 instead of localhost. So confused 😖

farmeunit

I am getting a similar error myself. I just upgraded to 1.16.1 from 1.15.x.

I initially had to update the MFA and another plugin, but after updating, I get this when submitting a ticket, or closing a ticket that requires and email to send. The email DOES actually get sent, but I get this error.

Fatal error: Uncaught ValueError: mb_convert_encoding(): Argument #2 ($to_encoding) must be a valid encoding, "localhost" given in /home/lawson11/public_html/helpdesk/include/class.charset.php:64 Stack trace: #0 /home/lawson11/public_html/helpdesk/include/class.charset.php(64): mb_convert_encoding('"Shane Farmer"', 'localhost', 'ISO-8859-1') #1 /home/lawson11/public_html/helpdesk/include/class.format.php(60): Charset::transcode('"Shane Farmer"', 'ISO-8859-1', 'localhost') #2 /home/lawson11/public_html/helpdesk/include/class.mailparse.php(580): Format::mimedecode('"Shane Farmer"', 'localhost') #3 /home/lawson11/public_html/helpdesk/include/pear/Mail.php(255): Mail_Parse::parseAddressList('"Shane Farmer" ...', 'localhost', false) #4 /home/lawson11/public_html/helpdesk/include/pear/Mail/smtp.php(291): Mail->parseRecipients('"Shane Farmer" ...') #5 /home/lawson11/public_html/helpdesk/include/class.mailer.php(587): Mail_smtp->send('"Shane Farmer" ...', Array, '--=_f26b17f781d...') #6 /home/lawson11/public_html/helpdesk/include/class.email.php(190): Mailer->send(Array, 'Support Ticket ...', '<h3><strong>Dea...', Array, Array) #7 /home/lawson11/public_html/helpdesk/include/class.email.php(195): Email->send(Object(TicketOwner), 'Support Ticket ...', '<h3><strong>Dea...', NULL, Array) #8 /home/lawson11/public_html/helpdesk/include/class.ticket.php(1692): Email->sendAutoReply(Object(TicketOwner), 'Support Ticket ...', '<h3><strong>Dea...', NULL, Array) #9 /home/lawson11/public_html/helpdesk/include/class.ticket.php(4572): Ticket->onNewTicket(Object(MessageThreadEntry), true, true) #10 /home/lawson11/public_html/helpdesk/open.php(45): Ticket::create(Array, Array, 'Web') #11 {main} thrown in /home/lawson11/public_html/helpdesk/include/class.charset.php on line 64

https://i.imgur.com/N0Rk7MH.png (Information page in osTicket)

bbryant

@farmeunit

Not sure if this thread will get any more attention so I'm gonna do my good deed for the day. The change I mentioned making at the top of the thread is what I have done to fix the issue and it's still working for me to this day. If your not too afraid to get your hands dirty and edit the PHP I suspect it should work just the same for you.

I did a lot of looking around at old revisions of the code and I have a hunch as to what is going on. I'm not much of a dev though so my opinions aren't worth a whole ton. What appears to be the issue though is that parseAddressList used to be a function in a different file that was removed at some point. That function took 5 options instead of the 3 we see today and the value of the second option where we are seeing localhost passed today was initially meant to contain the hostname of the target email address. In the new function that value is meant to be a text format type. That is why my fix works I think. But that's just some musings from someone with little practical experience coding.

This is your warning though, I don't take responsibility for what that change might do to your instance. You'd be following the instructions of some yahoo on a forum so it's all at your own risk. I can't help you if it goes wrong.

mattv8

bbryant Your suggested change helped me out, thank you for this!

KevinTheJedi

bbryant

Thank you for sharing your findings. I’ll definitely take a look at this and see what’s going on.

Cheers.

bbryant

KevinTheJedi

Woohoo! Honestly just hearing that someone is looking into some weird issue that me and two other people have reported is awesome. I'd love to know if anything comes of this. Both for the sake of applying a real fix that isn't reverted every time I update and because I'm interested to see how close to the mark I was. In any case thanks for the reply!

KevinTheJedi

@bbryant

Turns out you were close! Here is the fix:

https://github.com/osTicket/osTicket/pull/6107

Thanks again for the report. The above pull will be included in the next release.

Cheers.

farmeunit

Just getting back to this. @bbryant - Hadn't had a chance to try your fix. I missed it the first time.
I did, however edit the file referenced in the commit by @KevinTheJedi , and that definitely seems to have fixed my issues. I haven't tried every scenario, but closing a ticket definitely caused an error and it doesn't now.