Email errors Broken pipe

Question

I all of a sudden cannot email in EE. When sending through Firemail I get a million errors like the following. EE 2.9.3 and FireMail 1.9.3. Was working earlier, can't image why this would happen all of a sudden

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Notice

Message: fwrite() [function.fwrite]: send of 11 bytes failed with errno=32 Broken pipe

Filename: libraries/Email.php

Line Number: 2073

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/user/public_html/home/admin/codeigniter/system/core/Exceptions.php:170)

Filename: libraries/Functions.php

Line Number: 446

Answer 1

I had something similar happen to me with CodeIgniter (which forms the base of Expression Engine).

This occurs when the SMTP server disappears in the process of sending a mail. fwrite() has a bug to be giving a wrong return (in a loop) in that occasion (see https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=39598 and http://php.net/manual/en/function.fwrite.php#96951).

Anticipation on the return value of the send() function is what I did: have it returned a "mail not send" message to the user so further corresponding action could be taken.

$is_send = $this->email->send(FALSE);