Auto responder perl error - charset

[4u123]

Got a support ticket today from a customer where sending an Email to an account with an autoresponder results in a delivery failure...

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

pipe to |/usr/local/cpanel/bin/autorespond [email protected] /home/username/.autorespond
generated by [email protected]

The following text was generated during the delivery attempt:

------ pipe to |/usr/local/cpanel/bin/autorespond [email protected] /home/username/.autorespond
generated by [email protected] ------

Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/perl/524/lib64/perl5/cpanel_lib/Email/MIME/Encode.pm line 72, <$res_fh> line 1.

The auto responder does reply but the subject is a random string of characters. The message is correctly delivered to the mailbox which has the auto responder enabled.

So I look at the auto responder and the first thing I notice is the character set they have chosen is "Windows-31j" which is available from a very long list of different character sets.

I changed it to UTF-8 and the error went away. So I'm guessing there is an issue with the script that processes the auto responder and this charset.

I'm not sure why there are so many to choose from. Most end users don't even know what a character set is - and I'm sure only a very small percentage of my customers would need to set something specific here.

It seems like overkill. when it comes to end users I think it's important to keep things as simple as possible.

My suggestion here would be to make this field fixed to UTF-8 - so they are not forced to choose something they have absolutely no knowledge of - then have a button or link for those that specifically need a different charset "choose a specific character set for this message".

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hi @4u123,

So I look at the auto responder and the first thing I notice is the character set they have chosen is "Windows-31j" which is available from a very long list of different character sets.

I changed it to UTF-8 and the error went away. So I'm guessing there is an issue with the script that processes the auto responder and this charset.

I'd like to reproduce this behavior on a test environment and open an internal case if necessary. My initial attempt at reproducing this issue was unsuccessful, as the autoresponder with the windows-31j character set worked without any error messages or bounces. Could you provide an example of the message body or subject that leads to the error/bounce?

Also, I did find one other instance of the "Use of uninitialized value in concatenation" error. In that particular instance, the issue was related to the use of the ASSP plugin. Is that plugin installed on the affected system?

Thank you.