CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have a group with nine contacts in it and I am trying to send out an email message to that group. Out of the nine, the same five contacts get bounced regardless of what email address is entered. I have the same email address in two different contacts and it goes through on one and bounces on the other. I've triple checked and the email is correct, no typos.

What would cause this to happen? What would make one contact 'bad' regardless of the email address? Or am I overlooking something?

Thanks

It seems that the bounces reported by CiviCRM are not even getting to the SMTP server. I had a user with a valid email address and CiviCRM kept showing that it was a bounce, and it indeed was not going though but there was no mention of it in the mail logs, either failing or successful. I deleted the user and then recreated it, with the same email address, and it now went through and was reported successful on both CiviCRM and the mail logs on the SMTP server, which was correct.

It seems that CiviCRM is failing to send emails that are directed to specific users to the SMTP server. It does not matter what the email address is, good or bad, specific users seem to simply not work. When there was a blatant bounce on the SMTP server, CiviCRM still showed that it was a successful delivery.

I had a user, John Doe, with the good email address john_doe@here.com, and it went though with no problem. I then changed the address to john_doexxxxxx@here.com and the mail logs showed that it failed, which of course was to be expected. The interesting thing is that CiviCRM showed that it was a successful delivery, which it in no way was.

Any thoughts on how I can proceed at this point?

Thanks

I'm really not a programmer and am not sure how to add debugging code to that part of the file. Could you be more specific?

I also found that I can send an email to all contacts if I use the 'Send Email To Contacts' option in the drop down box during a search. It only seems to be a mass mailing where I have this problem.

Thanks

I do appreciate all of your help. I just tried something and it seemed to work, with one small exception. I have not set up a cron job for this yet but have been using the following URL to send the mails:

http://cmstest/drupal/sites/all/modules/civicrm/bin/civimail.cronjob.php?name=admin&pass=admin&key=key

The result was that 5 out of 10 emails bounced, and they were tied to the contact and not so much the email address. I then changed to using this URL:

http://cmstest/drupal/index.php?q=civicrm/mailing/queue&reset=1

And all of the emails sent with no bounces. I then fudged an email to see how it would handle a bad one. Unfortunately, it still said that there were 10 successful sends and no bounces and I know for a fact that there was one bounce. But this is still worlds better than were I was previously.

I'm going to try and figure out how to get the cron job set up. Do I only need it to run this file?

<rest of path>bin/civimail.cronjob.php

Would something like this be enough?

1  *  *  *  *  user   <rest of path>bin/civimail.cronjob.php

Do I have to include a site key to do this via a cron job or is that only when using the URL to run it?

Thanks again for all of your help.

We use separate mechanisms for the ‘Send Email to Contact’ functionality and CiviMail’s mass mailings. If you want to debug this, you should go to the packages/Mail/smtp.php file and change the 122^nd line to var $debug = true; and go to the packages/Net/SMTP.php file and change the 92^nd line to var $_debug = true; and then try to send the emails from the browser (you should get the debug output on the screen).

The only issue that I am having is that even if one bounces, CiviCRM still shows that it was delivered successfully. I'm just happy to have gotten where I am, I'll troubleshoot that at a later time.

Please let us know if/when you find out what is the cause behind this. A good first step would be to see whether the bounce is on the SMTP level or later, as an email reply.