Forwarded to devs Enabled spell checking in Roundcube causes slow response and false positive error messages on sending mails

[Bitpalast]

Username: Peter Debik

TITLE

Enabled spell checking in Roundcube causes slow response and false positive error messages on sending mails

PRODUCT, VERSION, OPERATING SYSTEM, ARCHITECTURE

CentOS 7.9, Plesk Obsidian 18.0.38 #2

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION

When a customer enables the "spell checking" option in Roundcube and then tries to send mails:

- The mail is sent after a few seconds (according to the mail log)
- Roundcube keeps waiting and continues to display a waiting message
- After approximately a minute, Roundcube responds that the mail could not be sent (which is incorrect, because it was sent).
- In /var/log/plesk-roundcube/errors an error is logged similar to this:
[02-Sep-2021 20:43:28 UTC] PHP Warning: fsockopen(): unable to connect to ssl://spell.roundcube.net:443 (operation pending) in /usr/share/psa-roundcube/program/lib/Roundcube/spellchecker/googie.php on line 87

STEPS TO REPRODUCE

1) Enable "spell checking" in the Roundcube configuration of any mailbox.
2) Send an email from Roundcube.

ACTUAL RESULT

As described in "problem description" section.

EXPECTED RESULT

No wait, no errors with spell checking.

ANY ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

I think I remember that I came across forum entries that discussed the same topic many years ago and the the suggested solution was to switch the spell checking service, because https://spell.roundcube.net is simply not available any more. However, I was unable to find these forum entries and also was unable to find a source that explains what other service to use and how to implement that in the Plesk environment. Maybe a developer knows more about this?

YOUR EXPECTATIONS FROM PLESK SERVICE TEAM

Help with sorting out

 

[Kaspar]

@Peter Debik, the spell checker in Roundcube can be disabled by adding $config['enable_spellcheck'] = false; to the config.inc.php file in the /usr/share/psa-roundcube/config/ directory.

 

[IgorG]

From developer:

Actually, we already have a related ticket and bug. Also, there are several discussions from Roundcube GitHub:

• Spellchecker URL not answering (spell.roundcube.net) · Issue #8182 · roundcube/roundcubemail
• Error when "Check spelling before sending a message" is activated · Issue #8172 · roundcube/roundcubemail
  And patch where they disable default spell checker.

We don't expect that https://spell.roundcube.net will work again. So we will disable the default spell checker in further updates.
It can be enabled in /usr/share/psa-roundcube/config/defaults.inc.php with enable_spellcheck parameter. But customers also should configure spellcheck_uri to some server that actually works. There is a hint that Roundcube developers give to us in configuration commentaries:

Get Nox Spell Server from https://github.com/handwritingio/nox_spell_server or the After the Deadline package from http://www.afterthedeadline.com