Hi,

I was wondering if somebody would be able to help me find a solution to an extremely annoying issue. I'm not sure which version of osTicket i am running (inherited code) but it is an old release. I am also using PHP 4.3 which unfortunately cannot be upgraded. I have found that doing so breaks too many existing scripts.

For most of the time osTicket works propely by retrieving emails from the specified POP3 server mailbox and generates tickets. However, i have noticed recently that with certain emails osTicket becomes 'stuck' whilst retrieving and simply hangs. This results in lots of duplicate tickets as the cron job is set to execute every 20 mins. This therefore means that the same emails are read until the PHP script reaches the bad email and times out (resulting in the read emails not being deleted off the server).

I tried surrounding the automail script in a try/catch statement hoping that when an email can't be read (for whatever reason) it simply catches the error and progresses as normal. This didn't seem to work. It seems as though one of the PHP imap_X calls never returns and eventually PHP produces a server timeout error.

I eventually discovered that this only happens when i receive emails which don't have a character encoding set (all of which have been spam). I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the problem but everytime osTicket has become stuck, an email with no character encoding set has been the problem.

Below is an example of an email (header) that has caused my system to hang:

Return-Path:

Received: from localhost ("~!!X4j"!aMK!!5PY"!

Status: RO

It should also be noted that the email has no body to it - it is an empty email. Again, this is a common feature to all the 'bad' emails.

Has anybody else experienced the same thing? Can someone please help me with this issue.

Thanks,

Andrew.