Scheduled jobs giving unhelpful error message OJS 3.3.0.20

Describe the issue or problem

crontab runs scheduled tasks hourly. Once a day, just after lunch (just after midnight GMT) the job returns with just the message “Invalid address: (From): root@localhost” and no other information. crontab is running as apache not as root. Other emails are sending just fine.

The email address root@localhost does not appear in our config file; in our daily database SQL backup dumps; nor in the OJS code on github.com

We have a DEV machine but can’t use it for scheduled task debugging because so many of the scheduled task things can only be done on PROD (DOI minting, sending emails to users, etc).

I’m looking for:
(a) hints as to which scheduled job runs daily in this manner and where to find email address settings for that job
(b) how to turn up debugging info for scheduled jobs in OJS and/or
(c) how to supply an email address that works for whatever might be going wrong here

What application are you using?
For example, OJS 3.3.0.20 (but we’re a long-lived install and have upgraded through many versions)

Hi @stuart.yeates,

The root@localhost will probably be coming from your server’s mailer in a case where a From address has not been set. That doesn’t give much to go by, unfortunately. I might be tempted to add an error_log call to the send function in lib/pkp/classes/mail/Mail.inc.php to determine whether the problem emails are being generated via that route, and if so, to dump some information about the email before it’s sent in order to figure out what the code path is.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

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