[FIXED] How to check the status of the sent email when using emailext plugin

Issue

I'm using the email Extension plugin for Jenkins 2.332.3 but when I get errors with the configuration of the email Extension my build still goes successful even if I get for example

AuthenticationFailedException message: 535 5.7.3 Authentication unsuccessful

Is there a way to get build failure if I have incorrect configurations of emailext? My stage:

emailext(
                       attachmentsPattern: "test.txt",
                       subject: "Test",
                       body: "Example test",
                       replyTo: '[email protected]'
               )

When I have configurations valid I get

DEBUG SMTP: message successfully delivered to mail server

Solution

I briefly checked the source code of the plugin and this doesn't seem doable. All the errors are caught and handled gracefully. Check here. Also, the execution of the plugin doesn't even return a status code. Check here.

So AFAIU I don't see a way to know whether the email was sent.

Update

After thoroughly checking the code I observed that there is an option to execute a postscript after sending a mail. This script can be specified globally or within the pipeline. So I came up with a very hacky solution with some groovy. Basically, after sending the mail you can capture the response from the SMTP server. This response will have some details you can use to determine whether it's a success or a failure.

On success, you will see a response like the one below.(I used Gmail SMTP server here)

250 2.0.0 OK  1655253667 cc23-20020a05622a411700b00304f98ad3c1sm7772402qtb.29 - gsmtp

On Authentication failure, you should see something like the below.

535-5.7.8 Username and Password not accepted. Learn more at
535 5.7.8  https://support.google.com/mail/?p=BadCredentials q18-20020a05622a04d200b002f906fc8530sm8752555qtx.46 - gsmtp

As I mentioned earlier the pipeline simply swallows all the errors that are thrown and from the script, there is no way to access the current build context. Hence as a workaround, I wrote the response to a file and then marked the status of the Job based on this. Please refer to the following pipeline.

pipeline {
    agent any

    stages {
        stage('MailAndFail') {
            steps {
                script{
                    echo "Starting Mailing"
                    def script = "String response = transport.getLastServerResponse();println \"Mail Response: \" + response;File file = new File(\"/var/jenkins_home/workspace/EMAIEXT2222/MailResponse.txt\");file.write response"
                    emailext(
                       to: "[email protected]",
                       subject: "Test",
                       body: "Example test",
                       replyTo: '[email protected]',
                       postsendScript: "$script"
                    )
                   sh "cat MailResponse.txt"
                   def response = readFile(file: 'MailResponse.txt')
                   if(!response.contains("2.0.0 OK")) {
                       echo "BUILD FAILURE!!!!"
                       currentBuild.result = 'FAILURE'
                   }
                }

            }
        }
    }
}

Note: Make sure you change the file write path to a directory in the workspace /var/jenkins_home/workspace/EMAIEXT2222. Also, the print statements in the script will not be shown in the build console. You can see them in the Jenkins log. Also, make sure you approve the groovy script if you get an error that says the script doesn't have permission to execute. You can do this from here: http://JENKINSHOST/scriptApproval/

Answered By - ycr
Answer Checked By - Mildred Charles (JavaFixing Admin)