We were bitten by a Rails 2.3 bug related to ActionMailer today. It took us a good part of the day to hunt down due to the fact that it only happened in production and even then only occasionally. Basically ActionMailer occasionally sends your multipart emails as text/plain with html content.

Here's the ticket we found:

The RightScale SQS gem returned an exception from SQS multiple times, including retries. Not an unusual event. This could have been caused by the SQS service being unavailable. However, the team noticed that despite the failure the message was actually successfully added to the queue and processed as normal.

ActiveSupport logger appears to open the default ruby logger and remove everything except the basic log message passed through. This is done for all subsequent uses of the logger. Perhaps this is done so that the log message could be passed to a syslog service which will add timestamps.

Whilst trying to parse differently formatted date strings from rss feeds a pivot found that date.now is overridden by DateJS to return a new date. There was a suggestion, that later proved useful, to use google's rss reader to first clean up the different rss feeds to ensure that they all can be parsed in much the same way.