Invite with an invalid email address sometimes gets no response

[rboulton]

Just had someone ask me for help because they were trying to invite someone, and the bot wasn't responding. It turned out it's because they were messaging the bot with something like invite <foo@example.com> - ie, they were wrapping the email address with angle brackets.

I've tested a bit, and the bot will give the expected message to a message invite foo@example.com, and to invite foo@example.com> but will ignore messages like invite a@b.c or invite <foo@example.com.

Looking at the code, in

xgovslackbot/app/slack_bot.js

Line 290 in 97a13b2

if (err) { return res.send('Error:' + err); }

it looks like if the slack API returns any error code, no message will be displayed (but something will be logged). I'd guess that the slack API is returning an error code for some of these emails, rather than (or as well as) returning details of the error in the JSON response.

I'd suggest running an instance in a test slack instance to debug this.