ASPMail Troubleshooting

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How do I determine the cause of a mail failure?

Note about FromAddress: You must specify a value for the FromAddress property. Mail failure will occur without a FromAddress.

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. If 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 address was misconfigured. The SMTPLog feature allows you to verify if the transactions are complete and valid before pursuing other avenues in determining the cause of failure.

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What would cause an "Operation timed out error"? or "ASPMail has been working great but suddenly I'm getting an 'Operation timed out' error.

Reasons for operation timed out include:

  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

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I'm adding attachments but they aren't being added to the actual mailing. What's wrong?

  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.

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"AddCC or AddBCC doesn't work" - is this a bug with 'ASPMail'? or "I adding multiple recipients but only the first one is getting delivered. What's wrong with ASPMail?"

AddRecipient, AddCC and AddBCC work just as they should. The problem is not with ASPMail. It is likely that your SMTP server is rejecting "foreign addresses" (see "no relay" question below).

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).

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How do I create a line-break in a message?

Under VBScript you can use the predefined constant VbCrLf. Simply using a Chr(13) or a Chr(10) will not work --you must use both -- the VBCrLf defined constant is the preferred method. A Carriage-return and line-feed character are required to create a new line in the message. See the sample scripts for examples.

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How do I set the username and password to send mail?

Standard SMTP does not use a uid/pwd so it isn't needed. The protocol used to retrieve mail, POP3 typically requires a uid/pwd but ASPMail doesn't use POP3 since it is a send mail component.

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My mail to AOL is bouncing. What am I doing wrong?

AOL will not accept anything other than a true address in the "From:" heading. Just about every mail system out there, except AOL and Compuserve, will accept the "No Mail Address" as the "From:" header. (thanks to R.S for this info).

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Does ASPMail support 8bit messages? or "does ASPMail support Japanese character set"

ASPMail supports any 8 bit characters but please note:

  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 page 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.

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Can I repeatedly assign values to the BodyText property? and "The message text keeps growing with each email I send."

Yes, the text will be appended to the message. Use ClearBodyText if you need to clear the message text.

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Can ASPMail be used to retrieve files off the client computer?

ASPMail is a server-side component. Retrieving files from the client computer requires a client-side component that has access to the client's local harddisk or a browser that supports file uploads in addition to a server side component/extension that can accept those files. ASPMail does not support this function.

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The SMTP server is reporting back a "no relay" error. What's wrong?

The SMTP server is looking at your FromAddress and determining that it doesn't know who you are. Some SMTP servers are configured to disallow the "relaying" or transfer of mail originating from addresses outside of its own domain. The only solution is to provide a FromAddress that's local to the SMTP server's domain or get the operator of the SMTP server to allow the FromAddress you are using. This setting is commonly used by ISP's to prevent spammers from using their resources.

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Some of our emails are getting equal signs at the end of lines in some messages. Why?

ASPMail can encode high characters using a scheme where the = sign
indicates a character to be decoded follow by the hex string value of
the character to be encoded. This system of course assumes that the client can decode these characters (which most can). This is called quoted-printable encoding. The default for ASPMail is not to use QP encoding. Things that trigger automatic QP encoding:

  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.

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