"Failed to send" particular or always all receiver?

Valued delta-chart team, developers, user,

in somehow rekated to "pending message" issue - #32 by SamanaJohann but also as stand-alone. If a chat contains an not reachable contact or if a message fails to be delivered to one of the contacts, do others in the chart get the message or is it “failed” for all, required to resend again?

I am currently working on improving this situation. If a message fails because one or more recipients couldn’t get reached, the e-mail is not getting sent. At least in theory, probably there are smtp servers out there who try to send it to as many recipients as possible, but in theory the message should get dropped.

The way i’m currently trying to fix it, is:

  1. Sending the message fails immediatly after the first try. Currently deltachat thinks this is a problem that will solve itself and retries to send the message for 30 times, which can take several days or longer (after each try the time deltachat waits before it tries again is getting increased). I catch this specific error and change the logic to not try it again, but immediatly say, sending this message failed.
  2. Improving the error message. It’s clear that sending the message failed because one or more recipients are not reachable. Telling the use which e-mail address sadly need to get removed is important.

One thing that is remaining:

  • Also removing a person from the group leads to the same problem, the message telling the group participients fails to get send out. But, the local deltachat already thinks the person is removed, even if the message didn’t get send out properly (this is maybe a bug on it’s own, but currently helps us). I don’t really know yet how to handle this problem. A solution would be to read/parse the error message the smtp server sends (which is something like <user@nonexistant.mail>: Recipient address rejected: Domain not found), get out the e-mail address and try to resend the mail again but taking out this participent.

Sadhu, sadhu (appreciation), master Jikstra.

Not sure if such would work, as thought on before. It seems like as if “normal” clients do not send a cc-messages as a bundle but to one contact by one.

(And at least now, informed, my person can remove the problematic recipient and send again. Maybe, if else doesn’t work, simply such info is already a help)

Oh yes, it will look weird and the delete member message stays pending but should work :slight_smile:

Worked in case, as workaround, yes.