AspMail 4.x

or

The message is sent but I never receive it. What's wrong?

or

It's been working fine for 3 years and now it appears that the messages are not getting delivered.

If the component can determine why the SendMail method failed, that information will be stored in the Response property. So, for example, to print that information to the clients browser you could add the following code:

if not Mailer.SendMail then
  if Mailer.Response <> ''" then
    strError = Mailer.Response
  else
    strError = "Unknown"
  end if
  Response.Write "Mail failure occured. Reason: " & strError
end if

Another fairly common problem is when a user reports that a specific feature is not working. For example BCC's may seem to never reach their destination. A valuable debugging tool is available with the SMTPLog feature. Assign a valid filename to this property and the contents of the SMTP transaction that occurs during a SendMail call will be recorded to this file. I

f you find that the SMTP transaction occurs without error then you should check elsewhere for the cause of mail delivery failure. Invariably the user finds that the BCC address was invalid or that the SMTP server is not relaying mail for the recipient domain. 

The SMTPLog feature allows you to verify if the transactions are complete and valid before pursuing other avenues in determining the cause of failure. If you see no errors in the SMTPLog then you need to check downstream of AspMail starting with the SMTP server you are using to send, as well as the recipient SMTP server. Anti-spam features on either machine may be identifying your message as spam and may need to be reconfigured. Check with the SMTP server administrators.

500 (503, 554 etc...) series errors are errors that the SMTP server generates. The exact meaning of the error depends upon your configuration and SMTP server. Please consult your SMTP server documentation for specifics on what these errors mean. Some of these are covered below but these errors are being issued by your SMTP server and AspMail is merely passing them on to you.

"File Access Denied"

or

"Cannot create file"

or

"I have a TMP/TEMP var but it still isn't working"

What's wrong?

• You probably don't have a TMP or TEMP path set up, or if you do, the IIS User (or any users authenticating under IIS) don't have read/write access to the this directory.
  1. Make sure the directory exists.
  2. Make sure you have FREE space on that partition/directory
  3. Make sure the TMP or TEMP variable exists in your NT/Win95 environment. Under NT this must be a system environment variable, not a user environment variable. If TShoot (see our tech support page) doesn't show the var it isn't a system var. It must be a system var.

How to determine where your TMP/TEMP dir points to

AspMail versions 2.5.8 and higher have a method called GetTempPath. To display where your TMP path is set to place the following code in an ASP script and run it.

Set Mailer = Server.CreateObject("SMTPsvg.Mailer")
Response.Write Mailer.GetTempPath

Your Win32 OS is designed to find your temporary path in the following manner:

1. Check for TMP.
2. If it does not exist, check for TEMP.
3. If it does not exist use the current directory. ASP tends to use the \WinNT directory in this case.

• The problem is the TMP path noted above  99% of the time. If you have double-checked that the system (not user) env var exists
  • Make sure all users which need access to the component (the anonymous IIS user and any other users which authenticate under IIS) have read/write access to this path.
  • Make sure that the drive where the TMP path points to has free disk space
  • Check to see if the user has a disk space quota (under NT 4 this would only be available through 3rd party quota software; this is now built in to Win2K)

There are no other known causes for this error so please check the above issues. If you fail to resolve the issue then turn security failure auditing on using User Manager (NT only) run the script for failure, and view the Event Log looking for an indication of the reason it failed.

or

"AspMail has been working great but suddenly I'm getting an 'Operation timed out' error.

1. SMTP server is down, overloaded or simply not responding
2. Firewall blocking port 25 between AspMail and SMTP server
3. Packet filtering blocking port 25 between AspMail and SMTP server
4. IP route is down
5. Your Winsock configured DNS server is down

To check using another method run

telnet [smtp hostname] 25

from the IIS server where AspMail is installed. If telnet can see the
SMTP server, then AspMail can see the server also.

1. The path specified is not valid.
2. The user the component is running under, typically the anonymous IIS user, does not have rights to open the file. The anon IIS user, by default, cannot read from networked drives so a path such as \\foobar\files\myfile.zip is not valid.
3. The file is open by another process that's denying reads to the file (another process you have running has the file open for writing and is denying read access).

This command assigns the credentials of a specified NT user to the executable inetinfo.exe that hosts the IIS Admin service. You also need to configure your IIS to recognize those credentials. You do that by creating the file Wspcfg.ini and placing it in the directory where inetinfo.exe is located. This is usually found in the \winnt\system32\inetsrv directory.

The following INI entry should be put in the wspcfg.ini file:

[Inetinfo]
ForceCredentials=1

After that, you must restart IIS by issuing the commands:

net stop iisadmin /y

net start w3svc

or

"I'm adding multiple recipients but only the first one is getting delivered. What's wrong with AspMail?"

To test whether AspMail is functioning properly use the SMTPLog property to capture an SMTP session with multiple recipients. All the recipients you send to should appear in the log as the SMTP envelope is sent. If they all appear then the problem is with your SMTP server or an SMTP server down the stream (or your addresses are invalid).

Mailer.AddRecipient = "name", "name@address.net"

and

Mailer.AddRecipient =  "name@address.net"

both return a VBScript error. What's wrong?

Mailer.AddRecipient "name1", "address1"
Mailer.AddRecipient "name2", "address2"
Mailer.AddBCC "name3", "address3"

For example:

Mailer.AddExtraHeader "Sensitivity: Company-Confidential"

<html>
<head><title>AspMail HyperLink</title><head>
<body>
<H3>AspMail HyperLink</H3>
<%
Set Mailer = Server.CreateObject("SMTPsvg.Mailer")
Mailer.FromName = "Status Update Report"
Mailer.FromAddress = "useyour@isphostnamehere.com"
Mailer.RemoteHost = "your.smtp.server"
Mailer.AddRecipient "Your Recipient", "yourrecipients@addressgoeshere.com"
Mailer.Subject = "AspMail Hyperlink"
Mailer.ContentType = "text/html"
Mailer.BodyText = "<html><body>Here's some <a href=""http://www.serverobjects.com/"">info</a></body></html>"
if Mailer.SendMail then
  Response.Write "Mail sent..."
else
  Response.Write "Mail failure. Check mail host server name and tcp/ip connection..."
  Response.Write "<p>" & Mailer.Response
end if
%>

or

"Is the Microsoft SMTP service required?"

1. Check permissions on the pgp.exe. The anon IIS user (if you are calling PGP from that user account) will need rights to read and execute files from the PGP directory.
2. Verify the path and params you are setting up to call PGP.
3. Use task manager to see if PGP is getting executed on the server.
4. Check the Mailer.Response property immediately after you call GetBodyTextFromFile to see if any O/S errors are getting returned by the call to PGP.
5. If the error returned in the Response property indicates that file access was denied, or that there was a file access timeout you need to find out...
   1. If the file is getting created in the path specified.
   2. What has the file open. You can use Filemon for Windows NT and HandleEx from Systems Internals to help debug these issues.

The product page has several examples of usage from other languages. Be sure you are using AspMail 3.x since this version corrects a problem some users reported with previous versions.

or

"does AspMail support Japanese character set"

1. Message bodies may be 8bit.
2. Some SMTP servers drop the 8th bit in message headers including Subject lines.
3. You can encode message subjects using a new method named EncodeHeader. See the methods listing for details. Some character sets don't work properly using this method, some do. We don't have any support for character sets that don't work properly using this encoding.
4. SHIFT-JIS reportedly works fine with the EncodeHeader method.

Once you have SMTP mail going with the IMC, no further action should be necessary to use AspMail. (Thanks to Steve Crane for this information).

Note: You must enable the rerouting on your Exchange's Internet Mail Connector. Go in the properties of your Internet Mail Services (Exchange 5.0). Check the reroute incoming SMTP mail option and add a route to your domain. Mail sent to "yourdomain.com" should be accepted as "inbound". Thanks to Sébastien Stormacq for this information.

1) You can turn authentication on and prevent non-authenticated connections from sending SMTP traffic -- But the problem with this is that AspMail does not currently support authentication.

2) A better option, and one that works with AspMail is to use Exchanges ability to block incoming SMTP traffic from all IP addresses except the IP(s) where AspMail is located.

See your Exchange administrator for details on how to do this.

also "foreign traffic not accepted" and other similar messages...

or

"503 Need RCPT (recipient)"

1. High characters - characters with the following ordinal values 0..31,61,128..255
2. Long lines of a message body (you can turn wordwrap on to fix this case)

Most clients are capable of handling QP encoding. If your client is not capable then you should upgrade your client or you must work within the above limitations to prevent the QP encoding from occuring.

If you only have one host name setup then the problem will be found in #1) your calling SendMail more than once or #2) you are not handling cases where the user does a double-click on his/her browser.

1. Microsoft's ASP, not AspMail controls form data order. If you are looping through the form data in ASP order it probably won't be the original form order. You'll have to hard code field names to force the data back in a specific or original form order.
2. Required fields are a function of HTML and client side scripting, not AspMail. If you used a CGI library in the past that handled those issues for you, it what only because they delved into areas outside of SMTP/Mail. AspMail's only function in life is to send mail. It does not handle client side HTML/scripting.

1. You are going to have to configure WebTrends not to call these scripts. - or -
2. Modify your scripts so that if WebTrends is calling them they don't fire off a message. - or -
3. Contact WebTrends for another solution. AspMail can't control WebTrends.

Secondly, some SMTP servers only accept mail for locally known recipients. The SMTP server may be rejecting your message since it is being addressed to recipients outside the domain of that SMTP server. This is unusual but could possibly be the problem you are running into.

1. The slower the TCP connection the longer the mailing will take. Typically a local server is much faster than a remote server. If you are losing packets between your server and the SMTP server you can expect longer times due to this packet loss.
2. The size of the mailing. The larger the message the longer the message transfer will take to send.
3. CPU utilization: If your CPU is experiencing heavy usage you can expect it to take longer to transfer mail.
4. SMTP server utilization: If your SMTP server is experiencing heavy traffic response times from the server are going to take longer thus increasing the time it takes to send a message.

One thing we've found is that by changing the RemoteHost name from a hostname to an IP address can cut 3 or 4 seconds off some messages. Even if the RemoteHost name is set to the local server's name, we've found some messages waiting for the hostname lookup. Just change the address to an IP and you may see an increase in the speed.