Attaching ColdFusion Error Reports To Avoid GMail Spam

Posted July 16, 2009 at 9:29 AM

Tags: ColdFusion

I am sure that all of us keep track of the errors generated by our ColdFusion web sites. I personally like to email myself the exception data using Application.cfc's OnError() event handler. Traditionally, what I do is just CFDump out a bunch of the relevant scopes (Exception, CGI, FORM, URL) in the email body and send it off. But recently, GMail (my email provider) seems to have cracked down on their spam filtering and these error reports, unbeknownst to me, have been going directly to my spam folder. Apparently, GMail doesn't much like an email that has over 50K worth of data directly in its body.

To fix this problem, all I had to do was convert the error report from the body content into an attachment. With ColdFusion 8 and the CFMailParam Content attribute, this could not have been easier. Here is an abridged version of my Application.cfc with the OnError() event handler defined:

Application.cfc

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Notice that rather than CFDumping out all of the scopes directly into the email body, I'm storing them in a content buffer. Then, using the CFMailParam tag, I'm attaching that content buffer to the email as the file, "error_report.htm." The Content attribute allows us to create a file attachment without having to write to the file system. This non-file, file approach lets us leverage the benefits of mail spooling without having to worry about file cleanup.

In addition to the attached error report, I also like to put a minimal amount of basic debug information directly in the email. Often times, the error message itself and the primary error context are enough for me to fix the problem. The attached error report then acts as a data reference if I don't know enough.

To test this, I set up the following code that purposefully references an undefined scope key:

 Launch code in new window » Download code as text file »

This error resulted in the following email:

So far, this approach has been able to avoid GMail's strengthened spam filtering. I guess, as a general rule, avoid sending massive email bodies.

Download Code Snippet ZIP File

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Reader Comments

Excellent idea Ben - thanks for that.

I have got used to having to check my spam folder for error reports rather than addressing the issue.

This is a very elegant way of solving it.

I'm going to bear this in mind for other report e-mails etc.. Nice.

@Ben:

Why not just create a filter to prevent Gmail from sending the folder to spam. You should be able to set up a filter to prevent e-mail from going to spam.

You could do this e-mail by the from address or by checking the subject line and then just choose the "Never send it to Spam" option on the action portion of the filter. That should prevent messages from going to spam.

@Dan,

Oh snap, I have filters set up, but I never saw the "never send to spam" checkbox at the bottom. Hot damn!

That said, I guess you can take the blog post as a suggest to never CFDump things into an email anyway??? I think the mail attachment feels like a better way to go, especially for a large amount of information.

@Ben,

Yeah I feel that as well. When I read this I thought of the rules method but actually feel this is a nicer way to handle complex e-mails. Makes it nice and easy to save off the attachment as well if you need to store it etc without Outlook or other mail clients butchering the code.

@James,

Word up. Plus, the output of CFDump in GMail is generally lacking readability and will slow down the page as I have noticed.

@Ben

Aha, yeah that's another good point! It always bugged me when I wasn't able to properly see the CFDump output from within the web client.

On the fly CFMail attachments FTW. ;)

Ben, thanks. I had the same problem with my work email but I just pulled the HTML out and formatted the email as text. Not as pretty but it works.

Question for you: Will onError() override the defaultExceptionHandler in the ColdSpring.xml of Model-Glue Unity?

@Jen,

I am not sure about how errors are handles in Frameworks (my experience is minimal). I might make a bold statement like it would be CRAZY if a framework crippled the inherent behavior of the ColdFusion Application Framework... but I might get laughed out of the room.

@Jen,

I'm not 100% but by default MG:U doesn't use application.cfc but I may have read it can be made to use it.. It's something that crossed my mind a while ago.

You can still use the default exception handler to do the same thing as Ben is doing here though. Just broadcast for a handler which takes care of the error processing and e-mail..

I just pointed out the filter method, because it's the more "full proof" method.

While this change may reduce the chance of your e-mails going into the spam folder, there's always the chance that Gmail might still flag the message as spam.

The filter method should prevent that completely. So I'd still set up a filter to ensure your error reports are getting through to you.

Oh yeah, one other thing to remember about CFDUMP (and as Jen may have hinted at) is that it supports outputting as plain text. This can be useful if you're sending to a device/client that doesn't handle complex HTML well.

It's not nearly as pretty, but its really lightweight.

@Dan,

Definitely agree - the "Never Spam" filter option is the full-proof method.

@Ben, @James,

Thanks. It appears that the MG:U exception handler overrides the onError() except when there is an error in the framework itself (i.e., invalid XML in MG.xml or error in a controller like vars not being declared at top of function).

So using both is kind of a fail safe (or safe fail in this case).

Couldn't you also simply write this html file to a secure directory on your server? I suppose storing it gmail saves server space. However storing them in your server would allow you to do things like, create a new folder for a new set of errors when they occur. Also you could use a simple verity collection or even easier, cfdirectories to tally your errors and when they occur. Just my 2 cents.

-Toby

@Toby,

You could certainly store them on the server; my only concern there is that they are, by nature, transient. Meaning, once the error occurs and is fixed, that file no longer has any value. Having on the server, I would think, adds the overhead of cleanup. Emailing it, on the other hand, is automatically removed from the server.

But, I suppose, if you wanted to keep a library of the errors that you could search through, which is kind of a cool idea especially for hard-to-debug problems over time, then that would make some good sense.

Trying this out. I didn't have a problem with gmail and spam cause I used the "never send to spam", but I hated the fact that all the styling was not shown correctly.

I just can't help but think the cfdump might be wht tricias not in yourpants. ;^)

I do the same thing, but the biggest issue I have, is web bots crawling the site, and causing errors by mixing and matching url strings. This will be less of an issue on newer applications that are more robust, but do you have any method for filtering out web bots that throw errors, from a real human's request?

PS. Let us know how things work out with Tricia.

@Toby/Ben:

One other thing to keep in mind: the more complex your error handling script, the more chances an error might occur in the handling script itself--therefore never sending you a notification.

For example, let's say your drive is getting "out of disk space" errors. If you happen to be writing your error logs to the same disk, you'll never get those notifications because your error handling script is throwing an error--thus not running.

Just something to keep in mind.

@Bash,

Ha ha ha ha.

@Tim,

I suppose you can update the error handling to perhaps check for certain things?

@Dan,

I would try not to think of errors within the error handler because hopefully, those have been ironed out! As far as running out of disk space, I can't believe I can actually say this, but I have gotten into that situation :) Usually, when that happens though, not even SQL can run (if its on the same disk) and the site basically dies. To be honest, I am not sure I even have a good idea for that other than to monitor your disk space better (and not have a small machine).

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