Errors when sending emails...Network Error (tcp_error) A communication error occurred.

Network Error (tcp_error)
A communication error occurred: ""
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The ISP is saying that it is their service provider which is preventing the emails from being sent, but they have tried it from numerous locations now, using different network connections, and still get the same error message. Can you point me in the right direction on this one? I have set it up so that it waits 5 seconds between emails, and sends a max of 25 emails every 5 minutes. This is well within the server requirements.

Thank you.

how many emails are being sent?

Does the error occur sending the first email?

what if you create another email script that only sends one email?

really, it sounds like a server problem, not a code problem.

double check the SMTP Server address that you entered and make sure you have the right port.

Here is the message that was in the email log table for the ones that were not sent successfully:

Sending To: ... mail() [function.mail]: SMTP server response: 503 Bad sequence of commands - Failure

Does this help at all?

How is the to address set up?

yo did not answer the other questions from my previous reply:


how many emails are being sent?

Does the error occur sending the first email?

what if you create another email script that only sends one email?

Actually, I looked at the email log table more closely, and the only emails that failed were when an email address was missing. There were only 5 failures, so she's still getting the error messages whether they were sent successfully or not. There is code in place so the sign up form can't be submitted unless a valid email address has been entered, so I'm not even sure how those empty records got into the database to begin with.

There are 2055 emails in the table that are being sent. Please see my previous response about the failures. In testing the program, I submitted a bunch of emails of mine personally and they all were sent without errors. Probably up to ten emails.

The empty records will be what is causing the error then. The SMTP server is saying that sending to: "" is not a valid email address.

Thanks, Jason. We'll monitor it,but now I'm aware of that issue, so I can more closely watch the log tables. I think I will delete all the data in the log tables for now so I can start fresh with the next mailing.

add a condition to your recordset to check for null values in the email address:


WHERE emailCol IS NOT NULL AND emailCol != ''

Thank you - I've added it.