Odd emails from mycncuk, blank emails with no subject title

[AndyUK]

It genuinely wouldn't surprise me if the quotation marks in the post title were causing an exception - which if anyone is smart enough to exploit could be a VB security issue :P

[Voicecoil]

I've now had 5 emails this afternoon suggesting that Lee has posted to the Lichuan stepper thread, but I can't see any entries there ....

[Doddy]

I've now had 5 emails this afternoon suggesting that Lee has posted to the Lichuan stepper thread, but I can't see any entries there ....

Same

[Lee Roberts]

I was up most of the night trying to sort this out guys, sorry, I have been replying to that thread and then deleting my posts after while I test different things.

I will reply again later once i come to a conclusion, I think Andy is onto something re the quotation marks in the thread title I took these out early this morning ready to do a test i'm now about to try, I could'nt finish it this morning/today as the rest of the house woke up and school runs, babys and sleep got in the way.

Thanks for the feedback, "ill be back"...

[Lee Roberts]

Appreciate the support lee, I know it’s a thankless job running a site like this.

Heads up, I got another tonight around 21:59

Edit...

and...

Cheers, although to be fair most people I help say thank you and those that don't I just except for who they are and move on :)

As a side note, on my travels I found this out:

“This message has no content.” error when viewing an email on an iPhone or iPad using the Mail app

Issue
When opening an email the message text/content isn’t displayed and is replaced with a message reading “This message has no content.”.

This is a common issue with iPhones and iPads and is known to Apple – https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5406637 – if you need assistance with your iPhone we would suggest contacting Apple directly or visiting an Apple store for assistance.

We know this wasn't the problem as I've found and fixed our local issue here but i thought i would past that on to you for future use in case it comes in handy for you.

Also, Lee, not sure if its helpful but:

You can turn on Email logging in your vB Options.

AdminCP -> vBulletin Options -> Error Handling & Logging -> Log Emails to a File

Hi Andy,

Thanks for that, I did do this early on but I also wanted to grab what the others were receiving so I had it ready rather than requesting it and potentially waiting for it to come in further down the road, I was always pretty confident the server had no issue's but you never know!

What I was sending out matched what you guys sent me:

SUCCESS
Mon, 30 Sep 2019 21:58:57 +0000
To: ********@********.***
Subject:
From: "MYCNCUK" <[email protected]>
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated
Return-Path: [email protected]
Message-ID: <********.********@www.mycncuk.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: vBulletin Mail via PHP

Note we have no message body in the above.

It genuinely wouldn't surprise me if the quotation marks in the post title were causing an exception - which if anyone is smart enough to exploit could be a VB security issue :P

Good spot, here's what I found when I removed the quotation marks from the title:

SUCCESS
Tue, 01 Oct 2019 18:06:57 +0000
To: ********@********.***
Subject: Reply to thread 'Lichuan Easy Servo closed loop stepper question'
From: "MYCNCUK" <[email protected]>
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated
Return-Path: [email protected]
Message-ID: <********.********@www.mycncuk.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: vBulletin Mail via PHP

Quick test message from Lee, m_c do you use an apple device by any chance ?

Cool, now we know it is something not playing nicely with quotation marks in the title, as in the above email we have data in the subject line and a message body that also contains what I posted.

I noticed that when I replied to the other thread, the notice below was being logged by the server:

PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected 'Easy' (T_STRING) in /includes/functions_newpost.php(1306) : eval()'d code on line 100

Looking at the code on line 1306 of the functions_newpost.php file, I didn't really learn anything that helpful:

1306 eval(iif(empty($evalemail["$touser[languageid]"]), $evalemail["-1"], $evalemail["$touser[languageid]"]));

But we did also know from the notice that "eval()'d code on line 100" had a problem, this bit of the notice is telling us that a plugin is having a problem and the troublesome code potentially lives on line 100 in one of the plugin files.

Traditionally the advice is to disable all plugins and re enable them one at a time until the problem shows up again, instead I looked at what hook locations were being used for each plugin and the most obvious one to me was the Tapatalk plugin as one of the hook locations it use's is "newpost_complete".

Looking at the code behind that function:

global $vbulletin;
if( !function_exists('tapatalk_push_reply') ){
    if( file_exists(DIR.'/'.$vbulletin->options['tapatalk_directory'].'/push_hook.php') )
    {
        include_once(DIR.'/'.$vbulletin->options['tapatalk_directory'].'/push_hook.php');
        if( function_exists('tapatalk_push_reply') )
            tapatalk_push_reply($type, $post, $threadinfo);
    }
}else{
    tapatalk_push_reply($type, $post, $threadinfo);
}

So before I started to look deeper and potentially start chewing up their code, I just disabled the Tapatalk app and run some tests:

The first one tested if having quotation marks in the title with Tapatalk disabled worked as expected:

SUCCESS
Tue, 01 Oct 2019 18:24:46 +0000
To: ********@********.***
Subject: Reply to thread 'Lichuan "Easy Servo" closed loop stepper question'
From: "MYCNCUK" <[email protected]>
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated
Return-Path: [email protected]
Message-ID: <********.********@www.mycncuk.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: vBulletin Mail via PHP

Dear m_c,

Lee Roberts has just replied....

Sweeeeet!, I new it had been quite a while since I last checked for a Tapatalk update, sure enough there was one waiting so I grabbed that and installed it.

I re enabled Tapatalk, removed the quotation marks from the title again and made another post to said thread, I didn't get the PHP Parse notice this time and the email sent out had everything included!

Moment of truth, quotation marks added back in:

SUCCESS
Tue, 01 Oct 2019 18:42:22 +0000
To: ********@********.***
Subject: Reply to thread 'Lichuan "Easy Servo" closed loop stepper question'
From: "MYCNCUK" <[email protected]>
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated
Return-Path: [email protected]
Message-ID: <********.********@www.mycncuk.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: vBulletin Mail via PHP

Dear m_c,

Lee Roberts has just replied....

and breath.....we have a winner lol problem solved.

Thank you to you all for getting involved and helping me get to the bottom of this this, I'm also sorry for not keeping things up to date like I have previously, I'll keep it short and sweet and just say my life has been a whirlwind over the last two years and the stress has effected me quite badly, things have only just started to settle back down, hence the reason I've been more active recently.

Keep up the good work of making it your community guys, the reward for me is seeing it continue to be successful, seriously thank you

Lee

[Kitwn]

Thanks for all your effort Lee, much appreciated. Now get some kip!

Kit

[AndyUK]

And now we know that Lee is a qualified detective.... :) Nice one!