devot:eeDevoted to ExpressionEngine

Our client got this message after sending their first newsletter:

An Error Was Encountered
Unable to send email at this time.

Unable to send email using PHP mail(). Your server might not be configured to send mail using this method.

We didn’t have any problem sending it to our test-list. On the overview page we see that 261 of the 268 e-mails have been sent. How do we find out what went wrong and how we can fix this?

We’re using ExpressionEngine 2.9.2 and FireMail 1.8.16

can you check that email sending is working by sending another test email? does your web host impose any limits on PHP mail?

I just tried to send email to the test-list again, and that’s possible.

The hosting-company says they only have a limit of 1000 e-mail per day. This is not the case because they only tried to send this one newsletter to 268 recipients.

We’ve sent the mail in batches. Is it possible that there are 7 ‘wrong addresses’? We’ve added them all by hand into the mailing-list plugin of ExpressionEngine.

Any other thoughts on where to look?

can you look in the exp_email_cache table in your database? it will contain the email in question and in the recipient_array column you should see the remaining email addresses to send to. can you please verify that they are all valid email addresses? also what happens when you try to send the next batch in the main FireMail page?

I don’t see anything weird in the recipient-array. The only mail-address that sticks out is this one:

rvk@zja.nl‎

It’s valid, but I couldn’t add it directly in the maillist-plugin of expressionEngine, but I’ve put it into the database myself by hand.

I’ll take this one out and try to send the remainder of the batch.

After getting that one out (out of the mailing-list AND out of the left over recipients in the database) it still gives the same PHP-error.

Another update:

I removed another e-mail: schedler@vce.at‎ as well. It looks valid to me, but now the remaining 5 mails were sent! Any idea why these e-mail addresses (I guess it’s both of them) are being marked unvalid and crash the plugin?

the email server must have rejected those email addresses for some reason. when an email fails, FireMail lets you know about it rather than skipping over it. changing this so that sending continues and the error is reported is an upcoming feature so i’ll let you know once it becomes available.

Allright, noted. Thanks for the help and please let us know indeed when that feature will be available.

FireMail 1.9.0 was just released which has better error handling and reporting

Thanks for letting us know! We will update soon.