How do I stop logging mail service errors in stdout in JIRA?

Question

Hi, I'm having a problem with my JIRA server.  We're running out of hard drive space, and the most direct cause is the fact that there's a problem with our email service in JIRA, and the errors are getting logged over and over.  This is causing the stdout log file to grow by hundreds of MB per day.  I've gone in to the log4j.properties file and set every WARN value to FATAL, but still the email messages are getting logged.  I don't have time right now to work on the base problem of why the email messages are occurring, so I just want the logging to stop.  If anyone can please tell me how to do this I'd REALLY appreciate it.

Solitonman · Answer

I never did find an option to stop logging programatically, but I did finally notice the Logging & Profiling tab in the Troubleshooting and Support area of the administration interface.  In there I turned off the email logging and set the level for most other options to ERROR or FATAL.  That has stopped the problem in the log file area.

We also did some checking on our email interfaces and found some items were "stuck" in the boxes.  Clearing those out seemed to improve performance.

Solitonman · Answer

Thanks for the suggestion Hanis.  I did a search on the server but couldn't find a JAVA_OPTS anywhere (no environment variables, nothing in the Java console), nor could I find a Dmail.debug in the registry.

Looking more closely at the messages bulking up the log, they are coming from ServiceRunner and are error and info messages related to the mail handlers.  I've no idea how to fix this, I've set the reporting level to FATAL for com.atlassian.jira.service in the Logging and Profiling interface of the Admin area.  But the messages still seem to accumulate.

One of the problems is that some of the incoming emails have no subject line, and therefore can't create an issue.  I'm trying to resolve that at the creation end of things, but I don't know if that will work.  Seriously, all I want is to stop the logging, it's truly killing us.  Just this morning I moved the log that's accumulated since 8/9, and it was over 800 MB.  My next move will be to turn off logging altogether until we can resolve the underlying issue.

hsuhailah · Answer

Do you happened to have -Dmail.debug=true parameter configured in JAVA_OPTS or in the Windows Registry? You can double check on this and if there is, you can remove it.