Emails stopped fetching after OS upgrade

jrawbits

Any clues about why email fetching would suddenly stop working?

I've been happily fielding a hundred or so tickets per day in OSTicket
for several years via emails to several different email accounts.
Recently moved to 1.17 on PHP 8.1 on an Ubuntu 22.04 server, and
apparently after an OS package upgrade today, the emails have stopped
fetching.

I've tried a range of obvious things:

Manually running the cron job
Checking dashboard log - cron is definitely running
Restarting / Rebooting everything

I'm imagining some package update is preventing the mail fetch within
PHP, but aside from a Linux kernel update there's no obvious upgrade
that might have touched OSTicket.

It's not a firewall issue since I can telnet to the various mail
servers. There are no PHP errors getting logged anywhere. Cron is
calling the polling function regularly (and OSTicket is logging the
call). But the mails are remaining in the email accounts, and no
tickets are being created.

Has anyone got any tips about how to debug this issue?

It will be pain to have to start processing the emails manually
(bye-bye canned responses and ticket history...), but fear I'm stuck
with that until I have time to try moving the system and database to
another server...

KevinTheJedi

jrawbits

You really should’ve upgraded to v1.17.2. You need to do this first. Also, for the fetching issue go to each email under Admin Panel > Emails > Emails and make sure everything is enabled and saves properly. Lastly, check to make sure the cron job is running under the appropriate PHP version.

Cheers.

jrawbits

For the record, I typo'ed the version. I am running 1.17.2 with a single PHP version (8.1) on a server that's been running for less than two weeks and it had been running perfectly up until this evening.

But thanks to your suggestions, I did find the fix, though I have no idea as to why the problem happened. Per your suggestion that I check that the email was enabled (it was), I decided to re-enter the account password "just because". On the next cron call, everything got pulled over. And here's the real kicker: I only re-entered the password for what I think of as the "main" email account, but after I did that, the two secondary ones also started fetching successfully as well (they were both stalled, but with a single password change, it all came loose). Just tried a sample email to each one and I'm back in business. I guess if you work with the plunger long enough, things just start flowing again...

By the way, I appreciate the rapid reply to my message: it encouraged me to try something new (and unexpected) and it worked.
OSTicket is an amazing system (and 1.17.2 was worth the upgrade compared to the 1.15.8 I had been using previously - nothing obvious, but it just feels "better").