Question

Scenario: I have a number of Codeigniter applications that I am improving the email delivery system to use a database queue. So my application logs all emails that need to be sent into the database. I run a cron job every minute to check this database queue and send out any pending emails (throttled to my server limits as needed).

It is all working fantastically and has dramatically improved our applications.

Part of the feature is it will record when emails are not sent, and will retry again later. As part of the process I update the database to include any error messages during the send attempts, for debugging later. I do this with $this->email->print_debugger().

Once again all working ok (normally).

The problem is if an attachment was included in the email, the attachment ‘data’ is dumped as part of the print_debugger() – so my database gets smashed with large text dumps of attachment data.

What I tried: So I went looking in the Email.php class of codeigniter, thinking I could extend the library to just not include the attachment data in the print_debugger() function – but it seems that the error that is returned from the function is actually from the SMTP server itself in another function. I cant see a way to stop the attachment data coming through on the error.

Question/Challenge: Can anyone see a way where I can capture an SMTP error, and the email headers – but not the attachment data? I’m happy to settle for not capturing any of the email body either (since I know what that is anyway in my database queue).

Answer 1

I believe that you can just extend the library. This is the current function:

public function print_debugger()
{
    $msg = '';

    if (count($this->_debug_msg) > 0)
    {
        foreach ($this->_debug_msg as $val)
        {
            $msg .= $val;
        }
    }

    $msg .= "<pre>".$this->_header_str."\n".htmlspecialchars($this->_subject)."\n".htmlspecialchars($this->_finalbody).'</pre>';
    return $msg;
}

There are four main parts to what is returned:

• _debug_msg – The debug messages
• _header_str – The email’s headers
• _subject – The email’s subject
• _finalbody – The body of the message and the attachment data

Implementing a similar function, without _finalbody should give you the desired output but without the body and attachment data.

Here’s an example solution, (with the class ‘MY_Email’ located here at: application/libraries/MY_Email.php):

class MY_Email extends CI_Email
{
    public function my_print_debugger()
    {
        $msg = '';

        if (count($this->_debug_msg) > 0)
        {
            foreach ($this->_debug_msg as $val)
            {
                $msg .= $val;
            }
        }

        $msg .= "<pre>".$this->_header_str."\n".htmlspecialchars($this->_subject)."\n".'</pre>';
        return $msg;
    }
}

---

Looking through the code for the class, I think that $_body may contain the body data without the attachment data, so it could be worth trying to append $this->_body, rather than $this->_finalbody to the function. I’ve haven’t tested this, so I’m not certain.

Hopefully this helps!