Semicolon at end of email list causes email to fail

[BonnieHellevig]

We just migrated to CheckBox and some completion event emails are not being sent.

It seems that if the FROM: TO:, or BCC: email address field ends with a semicolon, the entire email will fail. None will be sent to anyone. There is no error message or warning of this, so you’d only know it if the email was missed.

Is this a bug in CheckBox? Or was Ultimate Survey less fussy than Checkbox?

Example of BAD, will fail:
mickey.mouse@email.com;minnie.mouse@email.com;
underdog@email.com;

Example of GOOD, will succeed:
micky.mouse@email.com;minnie.mouse@email.com
underdog@email.com

Am I now forced to find all the instances in the database of semicolons at the end of emails and fixing them? This is not a happy prospect, plus it's hard to navigate this new and huge database.

Bonnie Hellevig

[pwiesner]

I am not seeing the same behavior. I was able to send responses without issue when there was a trailing semicolon in both the To: and Bcc: fields. There should not be more than one email address in the From: field as this is not support by most SMTP servers.

This may be an issue that is better handled by the support team; we may need to request information that you do not want displayed on a public forum (for example, the actual email addresses you are experiencing a problem with). I would suggest opening a support ticket and referencing this post in it.

[pwiesner]

I am posting this in case anyone else runs into the same problem.

It looks the error occurs when you have a from address with a trailing semicolon. It is not possible to enter an address with this format in Checkbox, validation prevents. I had to set up the scenario by altering the data directly in the database. I have added this issue to our bug tracker and am working on resolving the issue in our 4.5 release. In the meantime the following queries may be helpful if you decide to clean up the from addresses.

If you are comfortable making changes directly in the database you can use the first query to find the email addresses that need to be changed.

--Returns the list of email items with invalid from addresses
--BEGIN
SELECT
*
FROM
[ckbx_ItemData_Email]
WHERE
FromAddress like '%;'
--END


If you would prefer to make the change through Checkbox the following query should return the names of the survey that need to be edited.

--BEGIN
SELECT
TemplateName
FROM
ckbx_ResponseTemplate as rt
INNER JOIN ckbx_Template_Items as ti
ON rt.ResponseTemplateID = ti.TemplateID
INNER JOIN ckbx_ItemData_Email as ie
ON ti.ItemID = ie.ItemID
WHERE
ie.FromAddress like '%;'
--END

[pwiesner]

An update has been made to the Checkbox 4.5 development branch which should resolve this issue.

Can you please confirm that no exception is being logged. When recreating this issue I see the following error message in the Exception Log:

"The specified string is not in the form required for an e-mail address."