PN said:
First, I am not sure what to expect as I've never used these forums
before. I
thought perhaps it was a common problem and it didn't occur to me add the
error message. I do apologise for not being up to your high standards
however
a simple "perhaps you could provide more detail on your error" would have
been more polite. I guess you're an American
Do you expect the car mechanic to know what to look at when you walk in and
tell them "it's broke"? I don't care what language you speak or in which
country you reside, such an undetailed description of the problem means no
one knows what is the problem or where to look.
Second, I was unaware I was hiding "MY UNIDENTIFIED" (I CAN HEAR YOU) ISP
who in this case does not control this particular email as it is part of a
domain and there is unlimited quota.
Wow, which e-mail provider is that who provides an unlimited quota regarding
message size? Gee, I could send my whole 300GB hard drive's contents in
just one e-mail message. Yeah, I'm being sarcastic but the claim that there
is no quota means you really don't know. No such thing as unlimited. Your
e-mail provider will enforce a maximum size to your message - unless you are
the one operating your own personal mail server. However, ISPs will still
restrict your monthly bandwidth regarding e-mail (i.e., you can buy a
business account with a higher monthly bandwidth which is usually tiered
according to bandwith level and pricing).
You never mentioned what happened should you have tried resending the
message without an attachment and again with a much smaller file. The
e-mail providers that I use limit a message to 10MB in total size
(attachments are *in* the body of your message and will increase the size of
your message by over a third more due to encoding from binary into text
format). With a 1MB attachment, which would probably be 1.4MB in size after
encoding to text to insert into the body of my message, a background sound
file (which is an inline attachment), and a huge document occupying the
body, it is still possible that I could exceed my e-mail provider's quota
regarding the maximum size for a message. I don't know what is your max
quota for message size. That is something you'll need to ask your e-mail
provider. If you are running your own mail server (within the terms of
service for your account, since personal accounts are rarely allowed to
operate servers), it is possibly you hit your monthly bandwidth quota which
is enforced on both personal and business accounts.
From your other posts, it doesn't sound like you are operating your own SMTP
server. That means there are definitely quotas regarding maximum number of
recipients, maximum number of mail sessions per minute, maximum size of
message, maximum daily or monthly SMTP bandwidth, and possibly other
anti-spamming quotas. Call your ISP to see how many of them they will
divulge. Often they will not discuss some of them for fear that spammers
will use the knowledge to circumvent their anti-spam measures, but max
message size should be one that they freely divulge.
Third the error is as follows:-
Task **** - Sending' reported error (0x8004210B) : 'The operation timed
out
waiting for a response from the sending (SMTP) server. If you continue to
receive this message, contact your server administrator or Internet
service
provider (ISP).'
Ah, good, something to grasp onto. Try disabling e-mail scanning by your
anti-virus software. It often interferes with the e-mail client's timeouts.
Some AV programs will attempt to prevent timeouts by sending a bogus X
header to the e-mail client while they interrogate the message but that only
works when *receiving* e-mail. They can still cause timeouts when scanning
outbound mails while interrogating them for viruses. They cannot return a
status message (because the e-mail client would think the mail has been
accepted) or a bogus X header back to the e-mail client (because the e-mail
client is sending, not receiving) while interrogating the mail for
infections, so the e-mail client waits until the AV program gets done
checking the mail, sends it to the SMTP server, gets back the status message
from the SMTP server, and passes it back to the e-mail client.
Anything that sits between your e-mail client and the SMTP server can cause
the timeout due to excessive delay. Perhaps you are using some anti-spam
program that also checks outbound mails (I don't know of any but its
possible). I suppose even a firewall could cause delay since everything in
the path causes delay. It could even be a problem with their DNS server not
returning the IP address for your e-mail program to use to connect to the IP
name you specified for their mail server.
Another problem with timeouts can be caused by too much network delay. If
there is a lot of contention for traffic over your network (which includes
any outside network that you use), delays will result. If the above didn't
help, try running the following:
ping -n 100 <somehost>
<somehost> should be one that responds to pings (not all do as it consumes
resources and can be used abusively). You can try pinging your outbound
mail server, or your ISP's home page, or yahoo.com. ping defaults to only 4
requests and that is not enough to determine if you have packet loss and why
I mention a sample size of 100 pings. If you get a lot of delay or packet
loss then your e-mail client will start timing out (e-mail clients seem far
more susceptible to delay and packet loss than, for example, browsers). The
only way to cure it is to call your ISP and report excessive packet loss as
it is something they will have to fix (rarely would it be caused on your
end). You can call your ISP to have them check the line but they only check
signal strength, not packet loss. I've noticed e-mail client timeouts
starting with just 4% packet loss and abysmal performance, if any, when it
gets to 10% to 14% loss (but a browser will wait longer but display pages
more slowly). Every packet lost has to be retried which ups the amount of
delay, sometimes so much so that the e-mail client will simply timeout.
As to how high is too high for delay, well, I would probably start getting
anxious if over 80ms and start wondering when to call if over 130ms, but it
depends on the hops (hosts) between you and the mail server. Do a
traceroute (tracert command) to the mail server and see if any hops are
listed with a high delay. Some users in one country feel compelled to use
an e-mail service across the ocean where there is often a big jump in delay
for one host to make that transoceanic hop.
Some causes above would be exhibited for all e-mail activity whether for
large or small messages. It was unclear if the problem occurred for only
the one message with the 1MB attachment or that was an example and you are
having problems in general. If it is just for this large message, the
anti-virus scanner is probably the best target for the source of the problem
since it obviously has a much larger message to scan before it can pass it
onto your SMTP server. If little message go okay but big ones cause
timeouts, first try disabling the anti-virus program's scanning of your
outbound e-mails.
Fourth and lastly I don't particuarly expect a response because you
probably
don't like people being blunt or rude or talking in CAPS however I'm not
quite sure what you "EXPECT".
What you presented was just a topic starter post that would require one, or
more, bouncing back and forth to extract enough information to let anyone
start analyzing your problem, and which is a nuisance rather than providing
that information up front. Okay, so you're new, but look at your original
post and then put yourself in our place, or anyone else's place, to see if
they had enough info to even being figuring out your problem.
For info on posting (most are common sense but some are Usenet-specific),
see:
Good posts
How NOT to Get Help in Newsgroups
http://users.tpg.com.au/bzyhjr/liszt.html
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
