How can I find out the result of sending a MadExcept bug report from a Delphi app

Question

I can't find any way of determining whether it was possible to send a bug report from my D2006 app. If MadExcept can make some sort of return code available I can maybe provide some guidance to the user as to what might be wrong.

Answer 1

The problem is that MadExcept can't reasonably determine that. There's a whole chain of things that can go wrong after Madexcept sends the email. You will get an exception if MadExcept can't build the report or there's an immediate problem sending the email.

• email client comes up with the message, user doesn't hit send
• email client is broken or misconfigured
• SMTP host is broken, down or missing
• your client is on an RBL that you subscribe to (perhaps unknowingly)
• your client's domain is on an RBL or otherwise blocked
• your mail system hiccups and you lose that email

The best you can get from MadExcept is "no exception thrown, sending might have gone ok".

Answer 2

Maybe not a complete solution but useful information: if the bugreport is sent using a HTTP POST request to a web server, madExcept can detect if the response contains a HTTP redirect header, and in this case madExcept will launch the default web browser and load the URL given in the redirect.

So the user can immediately see that the report has been received and stored.

The web server could even analyze the bugreport and give additional information such as "This bug is already known and we have an update of the application which will fix it, you can download it here". (I wrote a web application, madxnet, for this purpose - it is still available for testing).