Bug: Register fails when no SMTP host is set

When in TWikiPreferences no SMTP host is set, registering appears to be broken.

After submitting the register form, the page hangs and gets a browser timeout. Re-submitting leads to a "user exists" oops error page, but the user name has a question mark, indicating that the user topic is not created. However, the password entry is created in .htpasswd. Reloading the oops page now shows the user topic as a normal link, and the user page is added to TWikiUsers.

So everything does work, but appears in a very broken way, without notifying the user.

When a working SMTP host is set in TWiki.TWikiPreferences, all works fine.

But this should not be a requisite; correct behavior would be that the user gets to see a Send Mail Error.

Test case

Environment

-- ArthurClemens - 09 May 2004

Follow up

Agreed. I ran into the same problem once when my mail server was off line. Registrations during that period received a browser error (due to a method being called on an undefined object representing the mail host).

Sending a mail is not really crucial. My first preference would be to omit it. If one insists on sending a mail upon registration, a failure in finding a mail host should be caught through error checking and a corresponding error message should be generated.

-- ThomasWeigert - 10 May 2004

Perhaps TWiki can be equipped to "do tasks later". Then we could warn the user that the mail could not be sent but that they would receive it as soon as possible. Also note that there were proposals that the user should be made to confirm their email address by sending a key through the mail to unlock the account. We even had a patch for that, IIRC, but it was lost in the pre-PatchProposal days.

-- MartinCleaver - 12 May 2004

Fix record