[ic] Unable to send mail / GPG errors cleared up after changing to Net::SMTP

[JT Justman]

Hi!

Our catalog (IC 5.2.1, offline credit cards, HIGH traffic mode) had been
having more and more intermitent "Unable to send mail using
/usr/sbin/sendmail" errors and "PGP failed with error level 12, status
12" / "PGP hard failure" errors.

First I applied the code from a patch that makes Order.pm retry three
times when doing encryption. The second try was always successful, but
the mail errors didn't change.

Then I specified the use of Net::SMTP in catalog.cfg:

SendMailProgram  Net::SMTP
Variable  MV_SMTPHOST  127.0.0.1

Since then I have had zero mail errors and no need to retry on gpg. I
have several custom mail messages that go out for each order, and this
must have been the load that was slowing down gpg, rather than the other
way around.

Just wanted to put that idea out there for the potential benefit of
anyone who may have experienced these errors. From reading the archives,
this situation might have be caused either as a result of having my temp
files on a RAID-1 volume, or of having simply reached the limit of HIGH
traffic mode; re-partitioning and switching to RPC are not easy to do on
a production server, and for the time being at least, Net::SMTP handles
the mail transactions efficiently enough to dodge that bullet.

JT