Mail Filter Doesn't Work Occasionally

[lhite]

i have a mail filter set up that works about 99% of the time, but mysteriously fails every once in a while for no reason that i can see. i can take emails for which the filter should have worked but didn't and run them through the filter test in the control panel and it will tell me that the filter worked -- but in fact, it didn't. further, i can see other emails virtually identical to the one for which the filter didn't work, and for them the filter did work correctly.

 

it almost looks like for whatever reasons, occasionally an email is simply not processed by the rules. could that be possible? what other explanation could there be for what i'm seeing?

 

lee

[TCH-Dick]

When testing the filter in cPanel are you just using the body of the email and/or sender, versus pasting in the entire email with header? I have seen this a few times and most were related to something simple in the header possibly triggering another filter first.

 

Since cPanel now allows easy sorting of your filters, and order does matter, I would move this filter to the top of the list to see if it helps. You can also open a ticket with the full email example and we will gladly assist in testing the issue for you.

[lhite]

interesting -- when i test the filters with the entire message including the header, it does indeed fail to work properly. but it's not because an earlier filter triggers first. i get the message that "Filtering did not set up a significant delivery. Normal delivery will occur". when i test with just the message body, it works as it should and i get the message "Filtering set up at least one significant delivery or other action. No other deliveries will occur", which is exactly as it should work.

 

it's as if something in the header is causing the filter evaluation process not to work the same as when the header is not included. like maybe something in the header is causing the evaluation process to abend.

 

i'm also getting a message in the filter window saying "**** debug string too long - truncated ****" -- i get that in both cases, using the header or not using it. what does that mean? it doesn't really tell me where the string is truncated, or for that matter what string it's referring to. and in this particular example, the filter will hit about 40 chars from the end of the message, so it would seem that the "truncated" message is not relevant.

[lhite]

ok, did some more testing and i think the problem is related to the length of the message. i can test the filters with just the message itself and the filter works. but then i can just add some arbitrary text in to the middle of the message, forcing the point at which the filter hits further down in the message, and that will cause the filter to fail.

 

so...... it would seem that the filters are only applied to the first X characters of a message (and X appears to be right around 4096 based on my limited testing). if that's true, is there anyway to increase that number? or any way to tell the filter to at least ignore the header stuff?

Edited October 6, 2011 by lhite

[lhite]

just found out from tech support that there is indeed a 5000 character limit on how much of the email message is processed in the filter evaluation -- so that explains why my filters were occasionally failing. the part of the message that triggered the filter was beyond the first 5000 chars. this limit is set at the server level, and so on shared servers, there's no way to change it at the individual web site level.

[Head Guru]

Just for you we increased this limit to 7000 on your server.

 

TCH.... rocks?

[lhite]

yes you did, and thank you! i wasn't going to mention that on a public board as i didn't want to be responsible for a slew of other users demanding that their server configuration be changed as well.

 

and yes indeed, TCH Rocks!

[Head Guru]

Thank you for your business.

 

Please remember to tell your friends about TCH!