Inconsistent Error with Sending PDF PostOffice Email Due to Volume (Mass Email)
Version: 8.2 and up
in addition to the "pause" solution. You can also look at other email service providers that are designed to support sending “mass” emails. For example, we use Sendgrid to send out emails for our hosted EDI services. Since we send out a lot these kinds of emails, it would be problematic for Outlook 365 to handle. You can consider using Sendgrid for the users who send out PDF PostOffice invoices. Sendgrid belongs to a category of providers called "Transactional Email Service" providers, who provide mass email services. For mass emails, do not use Gmail or Outlook 365.
Q - We are experiencing ongoing inconsistent issues with emailing PDF PostOffice invoices through the Printing Duplicate Invoices application. Below is an example of the error:
ERROR: Failure sending mail.
Unable to read data from the transport connection:
net_io_connectionclosed.
I was not informed, but it has been going on for the last 2-3 weeks and it happens 4 – 6 times every time the Print Duplicate Invoices function is used. We are sending about 200 invoices a day. If you look at the email log file, you will see the sending of emails is OK with many entries, and then suddenly we have several errors happening consecutively. See sample screen below:
I explained to our IT person that the error is coming from his email services. I don’t think he knows what to do and obviously it is Elliott that receives the red flag. I increased the Global Setup for PDF PostOffice setup to pause from 2 seconds to 3 seconds. Then it dropped to 0 - 2 errors per batch. But that does not totally eliminate it. I am afraid that making it 4 seconds will make the sending too slow.
As this is a random issue that is definitely because of the email service, I was thinking about having Elliott “try one or more times” to get the connection and not stop after one failure. Our IT suggested to split the sending of duplicate invoices to 4 or 5 batches of 40 – 50 each, but my opinion is that this is a terrible solution. Please help!
A - Elliott does perform a retry function with SMTP email sending. But the nature of the issue has to do with volume of the emails. In this case, it seems you are using Gmail as the email service. Most of the Internet email service providers place a limit on the volume of emails you can send. For example, Netcellent uses Microsoft Outlook 365 for email services. It places a limit of 30 emails per minute. This is done to protect Microsoft Outlook 365’s reputation so they will not be considered by other email servers as a “spam” server.
Our PDF PostOffice setup to allow for a "pause" is a solution designed to work with your email service provider that places a limit on your volume emails. Since the volume of PDF PostOffice invoices that we send is not that big, we don’t really have an issue with Outlook 365.
in addition to the "pause" solution. You can also look at other email service providers that are designed to support sending “mass” emails. For example, we use Sendgrid to send out emails for our hosted EDI services. Since we send out a lot these kinds of emails, it would be problematic for Outlook 365 to handle. You can consider using Sendgrid for the users who send out PDF PostOffice invoices. Sendgrid belongs to a category of providers called "Transactional Email Service" providers, who provide mass email services. For mass emails, do not use Gmail or Outlook 365.
EMK