dead.letter file showing in the WP installs [LOGGED]

Adrien

Hello,
Can someone explain me what is the dead.letter file showing in all my WP installs?

I'd like to understand how useful it is and if it can be deleted safely?

Thank you.

necrom

It's the result of any email being failing to send.

It is being generate by the control panel configured crons, both the Wordpress ones and bespoke ones.

I'm not on Fridays version yet, but I notice the "Request URL" cron method is still broken.

dead.letter will continue to fill up with every cron run that has output.

I'd be surprised if cron wasn't already something on the enhance roadmap and subject of support tickets, so I've not raised a ticket myself.

Adrien

necrom Thank you.

Adam

This happens if the website tries to use sendmail or PHP mail() and doesn't have an email role configured. The website app (PHP) container has a drop-in sendmail replacement called ssmtp which is generating this file.

I think we can probably suppress this behaviour.

MarkD

Adam
Just to clarify on this post, so if a dedicated server only has the Application and Database roles installed it can't send email out externally with Wordpress unless you use a plugin. But, if you install the Email role as well (with no mailboxes becuase the email is actually being dealt with by Microsoft or GMail) the dedicated server can then send email externally with no Wordpress plugins.

Have I got that right?

kyzoeadmin

that would be welcome in my opinion

Adrien

@Aliysa_Enhance Do you think we could log this? Thank you.

Aliysa_Enhance

MarkD HI Mark, If the website has an email server assigned it will be able to send. The email role doesn't have to be on the same server just within the same cluster.

If you install the email role after the website is created, you will need to use the 'move server' tool to assign the email role to the website.

Jordan

This also seems to be happening for the wp cron events cronjob. The output of the cronjob should be logged somewhere and then log rotated versus sending an email which is the default when output comes from a cronjob.

Adam

We've completely rebuilt the email system for version 11.0.0 and you will be able to specify a destination for cron emails.

If you want to log the cron output to a file, you can add to the end of the cron job

>> ~/cron.log 2>&1

This will redirect stdout and stderr into a file called cron.log in the home dir.

If you only want to log the last output, change it to:

> ~/cron.log 2>&1

This will overwrite the file rather than appending.