Email error: message "." on a line by itself

[Ronz]

I can't figure out why power church no longer sends emails. I get an error message that says:
Enter message, ending with "." on a line by itself.
I'm just sending one income expense report to one person.

I checked my smtp settings which are set to SSL and when I hit the send Test button, it says it is set correctly. It does not test correctly if I don't have ssl checked. Nor does it test correctly if I have the certificate checked.

I can send email from Outlook, including an attachment fine. The smtp setting for Outlook are also ssl and port 465. (don't know what port PC is trying to use in the SSL mode.

I wonder why it won't send?

[Zorak]

Without knowing your actual e-mail settings, it's not possible to help diagnose the problem.

Who is your e-mail provider? What do you have in each of the boxes (aside from your user name and password)

[NeilZ]

If I remember right, you can set the port for SMTP by adding the port number to the server name:

smtp.myisp.com:465

[Ronz]

Yes, I have since discovered that I can put the port number after the email address. I did put port 465 there, which is what my working Outlook's smtp is set at, and the test button shows a successful connection. I still get the same error when I try to send a report.

The server settings in the email setup is exactly the same as what I have set in Outlook. I have even tried settings for two other working email addresses with the same result.

I'm not running a firewall on the computer. Not doing any IP filtering. Ports are not being blocked in the router. Our ISP (DSLExtreme) is not supposed to be blocking anything. We are using Bluehost for our email and web services.

I assume Powerchurch is sending the email out direct to our smtp server and not encapsulating it to send to another server where it is extracted and then sent to our smtp server. If it was encapsulating it, my router or ISP could be blocking it.

[Ronz]

I just found out that it is only the income/expense report that won't send. It is a 47K PDF file. Some of the other reports sent fine - the balance sheet and the actual error page that I got. I think there's something in that PDF file that's triggering an email send abort. Maybe it's too big? The other reports were only 12K.

I did test the email by sending an 120K email attachment via Outlook and it worked fine. So I'm sure the email service is not rejecting the size. If it is a size problem, Powerchurch is rejecting it.

We need to send out a bunch of financial reports for real later today. We'll see what can send and what can't then.

[Ronz]

Reports failed to send, except for one 8.6K PDF file. The failed to send reports were larger multipage PDF files. I managed to attach one of those larger files (42.5K) to an email in Outlook Express and it sent fine. It appears my Powerchurch 10.4 cannot send large PDF files.

[Zorak]

I was just able to successfully send a 2.13MB PDF using PowerChurch Plus v10.4 using the powerchurch.com mail server to my personal e-mail.

This was on a 64 bit Windows 7 machine running Avast antivirus, Windows Defender and Windows Firewall. Both e-mail servers involved are accounts that came with web hosting, not gmail or yahoo type accounts.

Again, we know this functionality works and have tested it thoroughly. Any specific information that you can give us to work with will help diagnose the issue that you are having with it.

[Ronz]

Here it is a month later and we are again trying to send accounting reports and large reports fail to send. I had actually forgotten about the problem in the mean time.

I have no new information for troubleshooting except that we did change DSL Service in late November. I don't think I mentioned that earlier. The reports sucessfully sent in early November on our old DSL. They failed in December after we changed to DSL Extreme. I can't see how the DSL service can cause that problem. We did NOT change the email account. (The email account is not associated with DSL Extreme or the old DSL) Unless there is something in the email header from Power Church when there is a large attachment that DSL Extreme's filters or DNS does not like. I think my next test is to change the computer's DNS servers from DSL Extremes to Open DNS to see if that makes a difference. But I don't see how the DNS settings can cause that problem.

Our email via Outlook and all other internet related services (FTP, IE7, RDP) are all working perfectly. Power Church sends small PDF files OK.

Ron Zastovnik
IT Support
Memorial UMC, Clovis CA

[Tracy]

Are you still getting the "Enter message, ending with "." on a line by itself. " message you mentioned earlier, or are the failure reasons different?

See this post for helping getting to a resolution: http://www.powerchurch.com/forum/viewto ... 421#p15412

[Ronz]

Yes, the same error message. It acts like Power Church is truncating the email message. Maybe something in my system is causing it to truncate. Got plenty of hard drive space. Memory should be OK. This is running on a Windows 2000 Advanced Server. The email server: SMTP authentication required, SSL, port 465. We are using Bluehost.com for our email and web services.

The info in the suggested post does not seem to apply. If pauses are between emails, I'm only sending one email. Also the problem should be duplicatable in Outlook. So far, I can't duplicate the problem in Outlook.

Again, small attachments send OK. it is just the larger attachments that seem to fail.

[Tracy]

That message is returned by the SMTP server when it is ready to receive the data for the e-mail body. It suggests the process is timing out waiting for a response after the "." has been sent.

Do you have outgoing email scanning enabled in the systems anti-virus (or similar) program?

Can you send an attachment of this size without use an SSL connection?

[Ronz]

Thanks for that info. I did not know that message was actually coming back from the SMTP server. That leads me in a direction to look.

I changed my settings from SSL to none and it seems to be working now. Maybe it's a certificate problem. Loses authentication on pauses. I sometimes get a certificate error message when checking email. I should straighten that out with Bluehost.

Thanks. Looks like the problem is solved.

-Ron