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Why am I getting Error Processing Email or Invalid Message errors in incidents in our administration console?

Environment:

Techmail, Incidents
Oracle B2C Service

Resolution:

An incident with the subject Error Processing Incident is created when the techmail utility encounters an unrecoverable error.  The techmail utility either exits immediately on the error and does not shut down the process in a controlled manner or rolls back the transaction and exits with an error. Important: The Incidents created from this data-recovery process are real customer emails - Do Not Delete the Incident without reviewing the email.  You will need to manually handle this incident (see section Handling Error Processing Incidents).

This techmail error occurs due to some issue/misconfiguration within the site setup including but not limited to these common issues.

• Customization
• Business Rules
• Configuration or Message Base values
• Parsing the HTML of the message
• Something in the raw message
   

When an unrecoverable error occurs, the techmail utility notes that the last message was not processed on the last run.

Because the message was not processed correctly on the last run of techmail, an Error Processing Incident is created on the next run of techmail without trying to reprocess the message.

If an error occurred during the techmail run, an error code is indicated in the Utility Last Run log. For more information on viewing the Utility Last Run log, refer to Answer ID 1569: Links on Account and Tools pages on Oracle B2C Service Technical Support site.

If a database error occurred, the error is reported in the System Error Log. Staff members whose profile allows access to the Error Log will receive an error notification in the Communication Center. For more information on the System Error Log, refer to Answer ID 1853: Error Log and System Error Notifications.

Note:  The message base ERROR_PROCESSING_EMAIL_MSG is the value entered in the subject and will be different per language.  For convenience a site may configure the message base to be the same across all interfaces for consistent reporting on these types of incidents.

Reporting Error Processing Incidents:

The creation of an Error Processing Incident indicates an email message that was not processed correctly. Please note this is expected functionality to avoid data loss and intermittent occurrences are nothing to worry about. However, if they begin to happen regularly with increased frequency an investigation may be needed to determine the cause of the unrecoverable error. Should you decide to submit a service request to Technical Support, please provide any observation details on the Error Processing Incidents such as:

• Started on such and such a date
• Comes from a common contact or domain
• Only occurs on incidents created from a specific mailbox and/or interface
• A customization was recently implemented
• System errors correspond to the incident creation

Note:  Depending on the frequency of occurrence, the troubleshooting duration and methods will change.  To troubleshoot means capturing the error as it occurs which can take time if Error Processing Incidents are created infrequently.

Handling Error Processing Incidents:

For each incident where this issue occurred, there should be an attached message.txt file with the actual contents of the email message so you can respond to your contact. Note that there is no data loss for this issue as the attachment is the entire original raw email that was sent by the end-user.

You can view the message.txt attachment in a in a friendly format much like an email client rather than the email text file by doing the following:

1. Save the file to your desktop as message.mht.
2. Open the file from your Desktop. It should open in a browser window in a readable format.
3. Upload the file to the incident if appropriate and save the incident.

*Note: Many times it is also possible to change the file extension to .eml and open the attachment in outlook.

The recommended best practice in these events is to view either the original message file in a text editor or the saved message.mht file, and (if appropriate) copy the content into a new incident in your system, as follows:

• If you can identify some text relating to a support issue, you can copy it out and paste it into a new incident.
• If you see text indicating that the message is an update to an existing incident, look for the incident number somewhere in the content and use it to identify the intended incident in your database. Then copy and paste the text of the update message into a new thread in that incident to manually update it.
• If the file is unreadable or contains words associated with spam, you can treat the incident consistent with your process for handling incidents originating from junk mail. For more information regarding spam refer to Answer ID 908: Preventing SPAMjunk-type email from becoming incidents.

Since the original email is attached, you can open the attachment to determine the contact and incident information and either update the existing incident or manually create an incident from the contents of the attachment.