I'm working on a patch that updates smtpd, and when I ran the full test suite I got a hang in test_logging. This means there's a bug in my update, but there is also a bug in the logging test.

But see below for another issue I noticed while investigating this, that is the real focus of this report.

This traceback occurs before the test hang:

test_basic (test.test_logging.SMTPHandlerTest) ... error: uncaptured python exception, closing channel <test.test_logging.TestSMTPChannel connected 127.0.0.1:54226 at 0xb5773884> (<class 'AttributeError'>:TestSMTPChannel inst)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/rdmurray/python/p33/Lib/logging/handlers.py", line 935, in emit
    smtp.sendmail(self.fromaddr, self.toaddrs, msg)
  File "/home/rdmurray/python/p33/Lib/smtplib.py", line 741, in sendmail
    self.ehlo_or_helo_if_needed()
  File "/home/rdmurray/python/p33/Lib/smtplib.py", line 550, in ehlo_or_helo_if_needed
    if not (200 <= self.ehlo()[0] <= 299):
  File "/home/rdmurray/python/p33/Lib/smtplib.py", line 417, in ehlo
    (code, msg) = self.getreply()
  File "/home/rdmurray/python/p33/Lib/smtplib.py", line 372, in getreply
    raise SMTPServerDisconnected("Connection unexpectedly closed")
smtplib.SMTPServerDisconnected: Connection unexpectedly closed
Logged from file , line 0

I think the event.wait() in the test should have a timeout; setting it to, say, 5 lets the tests complete (with a failure) in this situation.

Now the real issue:

Looking at the smtp handler code, I notice that unlike the socket handler it doesn't provide any way to set the timeout. This means it could potentially hang forever trying to log an event, which while not related to the above issue is something that I think should be fixed.

I've marked this as behavior, since the SMTP connection should probably get a reasonable default timeout even in bug fix releases, but in 3.3 you'll probably want to make it settable and perhaps shorten the default relative to what you use for the maint releases.

New changeset 4b3f81720809 by Vinay Sajip in branch 'default':
Fixes bpo-14314: Improved SMTP timeout handling.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/4b3f81720809

I've added changes to the test code and a timeout to SMTPHandler (docs still to be updated), and I'll let it run on the buildbots for a bit before looking at timeouts for 3.2/2.7. Marking as pending to remind me.

New changeset 113b8e3cbba4 by Vinay Sajip in branch '2.7':
Closes bpo-14314: backported fix.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/113b8e3cbba4

New changeset 54055646fd1f by Vinay Sajip in branch '3.2':
Closes bpo-14314: backported fix.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/54055646fd1f