E-mail function error

[BGUMC]

I'm using Power Church V.9 on a Windows XP Pro O.S.

Yesterday I attempted to e-mail an attached contributions report to the Finance Chair Person as I have been doing every Sunday for years. However this time I received an error message. "Internet Connection could not be established", despite the fact I was indeed connected to the internet.

About 3 months ago I installed Reg Cure (a registry cleaner program), and immediately thereafter, Quickbooks was unable to connect to the internet. Reg Cure support, provided me with a process which exempted Quickbooks from Reg Cure's periodic scans. This had happened to others numerous times before, so Reg Cure support knew exactly which Qbooks files were involved. I do not believe that they will be familiar with Power Church, so I am asking for help in identifying the Power Church files which are involved in the Internet connection process so that I may forward that information to Reg Cure support.

Thank you for any help you might be able to provide.

Hal Schmidt
Financial Secretary
Ball Ground UMC

[Zorak]

PowerChurch Plus uses CodeStone components for sending e-mail.

You will find them under C:\Program Files\Common Files\CodeStone.

[BGUMC]

Reg-Cure support asked me to run a program called Combo-Fix which searched for and corrected a number of malware issues, but did not enable Power Church to e-mail reports.

I suspect that the Code Stone file may be corrupted, and would like to re-install the Power Church program. I assume, that in so doing that I will not lose the data in the program and that it will only overwrite the executable portion of the program.

Please confirm whether I am correct in this assumption. I do have a current back-up on flash drive, but fear that the back-up may contain the possibly corrupted file as well.

If I proceed with re-installing the program, please advise how I may dowload the updates to V.9.

Thank you,

Hal Schmidt
Financial Secretary
Ball Ground United Methodist Church
Ball Ground, GA

[Zorak]

You can actually just run the Netsetup9.exe program from the PCPLUS9 program directory.

This is the important part of the installer, which just reinstalls all of the system files that PC+ uses.

If you think the Codestone files are the problem, delete them or rename the folder before running netsetup9, just to make sure you get new files in place.

[BGUMC]

Well that didn't work. Deleted the Code Stone file, reinstalled the *.exe and I still can't e-mail from within Power Church.

Any ideas?

[NeilZ]

Well that didn't work. Deleted the Code Stone file, reinstalled the *.exe and I still can't e-mail from within Power Church.

Any ideas?

If you haven't yet tried removing then reinstalling Powerchurch, do this first.

1. Make a backup of the current database, check for your Registration number and other church data from Help -> About Powerchurch. You'll need this later.
2. Do a remove of Powerchurch using the Windows Remove/Install applet in the Control Panel.

I'm fairly sure that the Powerchurch\Data directory is not deleted during this deinstall.

Download the latest Maintenancde Release for v9 from the Powerchurch website. All MRs are cumulative, so all fixes for v9 are in the latest one.

Reinstall V9 from the CD, follow the directions and select NO upgrade of the database. When Powerchurch asks you for your church info, enter the data you entered above. FWIW ... if the DATA directory has not been deleted during the remove, you may not see this screen.

Exit the program, then apply the Maintenance Release by running the downloaded MR file.

If the data directory was deleted, you must now restore the backup you made above. Then test the email functionality.

If it now works. My suggestion is to not use the registry cleaner unless you have people adding and removing a lot of programs. Not all such programs recognize non-standard programs.

[BGUMC]

Thanks Neil for the detailed response ...........

......... unfortunately there's no change. I still can't e-mail from within PC. Error message says that Internet Connection could not be obtained. Apparently I've still got some sort of compatibility issue between PC, and whatever Reg Cure screwed up. I really thought the complete un-install>re-install would work.

At least I've got a work-around, whereby I save the reports and e-mail them through outlook. It used to be so much simpler and quicker to do them through PC however. Don't like it, am not happy with it, but don't know what else to try.

Hal Schmidt
Financial Secretary
BGUMC

[NeilZ]

Thanks Neil for the detailed response ...........

......... unfortunately there's no change. I still can't e-mail from within PC. Error message says that Internet Connection could not be obtained. Apparently I've still got some sort of compatibility issue between PC, and whatever Reg Cure screwed up. I really thought the complete un-install>re-install would work.

At least I've got a work-around, whereby I save the reports and e-mail them through outlook. It used to be so much simpler and quicker to do them through PC however. Don't like it, am not happy with it, but don't know what else to try.

Hal Schmidt
Financial Secretary
BGUMC

Sorry to hear that. I'm trying to think what else could cause this, I don't remember if you mentioned any firewall you happen to be using on that machine.

[BGUMC]

I'm using the Windows firewall which came with XPPro, and AVG free home edition, which I've been using since day one. All of a sudden a couple of Sundays ago, I could no longer e-mail from within PC. BTW, RegCure support says that their review of the logs does not indicate that they're the problem. Obviously something changed or happened but I don't know where to turn.

[BGUMC]

I believe that with the help of another tech support individual we now have a focused issue. Some time ago my ISP changed the e-mail provider from mail@tds.net to smtp.gmail.com which requires a Secure connection and authentication. In Power Church preferences > E-mail set-up, there is no provision to allow SSL connections or port entries.

Is there an updated version of Cold Stone which will permit making these entries?

[NeilZ]

I believe that with the help of another tech support individual we now have a focused issue. Some time ago my ISP changed the e-mail provider from mail@tds.net to smtp.gmail.com which requires a Secure connection and authentication. In Power Church preferences > E-mail set-up, there is no provision to allow SSL connections or port entries.

Is there an updated version of Cold Stone which will permit making these entries?

To add a port entry just do this: smtp.gmail.com:xxxx where xxxx is the port number. Then use the standard authentication system of userid/password which you can setup in the Powerchurch preferences.

UPDATE: I've just been informed that you're using Version 9, which I hadn't noticed. SSL is not available in version 9, it is available in versions 10 and the upcoming 11.

That said, try adding the port number to the SMTP server and see what happens. FWIW ... there has been many great features added to V10.4 that make it attractive in many ways, and the upcoming version 11 will be even better. You may want to consider an upgrade.

[BGUMC]

Thank you for your response, and while upgrading to V10 or 11 may sound like a cure for our problem, it may not. Reference the following post from another user of V10 in another section of this forum.

"We get the same error message. We got this error message a month or so ago, and it turned out Verizon had changed some kind of email port settings. No matter what we did we could not work around this problem.

What we ended up doing was changing the outgoing mail server to a non-Verizon provider, specifically the email server used by the place that hosts our church website. This worked like a charm....until about a week and half ago.

Now we are getting the same error message again. We have tried everything we can think of to make it work again but basically we cannot send any bulk emailings through Powerchurch. No matter what outgoing email we try to use, we get the same error message."

While I can appreciate that Powerchurch is not in a position to control the various ISP's efforts at spam control, I do not appreciate them leaving every user of V9 high and dry by not adding the ability to e-mail via secure servers as one of their several updates; and merely adding that functionality to a newer Version. An interesting marketing ploy, but one that poses an interesting question in business ethics. Powerchurch obviously recognized that V9 was no longer functional for e-mail purposes, so they added the Secure Server functionality to V10. Someone made a conscious decision to NOT add that functionality as a free upgrade to V9, thereby reducing the functionality of the program that we and countless others purchased in good faith. As a user of Qbooks starting with Dos V1, and now Pro V7, I am familiar with upgrades and their purpose. Never in my long history with Intuit have they ever subrogated a loss of functionality in a prior Version by creating a newer version. And yes I have been and continue to use the built-in E-mail functionality with no problem on the same PC as the one on which Powerchurch is installed and using the same ISP provider.

At this juncture I am unsure as to how I may decide to proceed, that said, I am extremely disappointed in the outcome thus far.

[NeilZ]

Thank you for your response, and while upgrading to V10 or 11 may sound like a cure for our problem, it may not. Reference the following post from another user of V10 in another section of this forum.
(SNIP)

. And yes I have been and continue to use the built-in E-mail functionality with no problem on the same PC as the one on which Powerchurch is installed and using the same ISP provider.

At this juncture I am unsure as to how I may decide to proceed, that said, I am extremely disappointed in the outcome thus far.

(Personal Opinion Mode)
OK ... comparing Powerchurch with Intuit is apples and oranges. Intuit is a HUGE corporation with thousands of employees, and thousands (if not millions) of customers. Powerchurch is a small company, with a great product, and only six or seven programmers.

Intuit can afford to include whatever it wants in its products as it has a steady stream of income from Quicken, Quicken Online, Quickbooks, TurboTax etc, and versions out every year, which individuals and businesses upgrade to. Powerchurch has one producrt, with updates every other year or so, and maintenance updates every few months when needed, and many churches do not normally upgrade (witness someone writing a post in the forum on version 7) thus their income does not allow them the luxury of including every new thing in every version.

In addition, equating the built-in Email function of your computer with the Email function of Powerchurch is another apples/oranges comparison. I suspect that you're using Outlook Express (or Windows Mail, or whatever they call it nowadays) for your email. That program was designed from the ground up as an email program, and has specially created code to cover for all types of ISP logins. Powerchurch must rely on commercially created libraries for such things, and sometimes they cannot control what functionality is included in these libraries. Version 9 was written in a version of FoxPro that is no longer supported, and I suspect that this includes the commercial library they used for the email function. Thus while they may want to include additional functionality, they can't.

That said, did you notice that the person who wrote that quote you included, deleted their comments since Powerchurch tech support was working with someone else in that church to fix the issue ?? So the problem is not only restricted to version 9 as you pointed out. So, does this make it a Powerchurch issue, not necessarily. This is like blaming Intuit for not including 2010 tax info in 2009 TurboTax. While I've seen a few people do experience problems with their emailing, both in v10 and v9, I've also seen them get answers to fix their problem, either on the forum, or through the tech support line.

I've been using PowerChurch for over 10 years, and during that time I've found that the small company called PowerChurch Software has been very responsive to its customers, including functionality and fixes in an extraordinarily short amount of time. A post like the one above is unhelpful, and unwarranted IMHO.
(Personal Opinion Mode OFF)

That said, you never mentioned what ISP are you using, nor dId you say if you tried to add the port number to the outgoing server as listed in my previous post.

[BGUMC]

Whew Neil.... Personal opinions aside, Intuit started as a small company in the Nineties and grew to be a huge company by doing things right, by listening to their customers. I saw an issue who's off handed fix (upgrade) did not set well with me. And insofar as my personal opinion is concerned, people as well as Companies learn more from critical remarks, than they do from complimentary ones. The ISP is "tds.net" who in April changed from in-house tds.net server to Google's smtp.gmail.com. This obviously brought along more restrictions, and settings needed to be changed in Outlook Express, but not Powerchurch. For months the program (Powerchurch) responded beautifully, and then one Sunday months later quit connecting, presumably because Google kept tweaking their restrictions. Yes the port :465 was added but had no effect.

[NeilZ]

Whew Neil.... Personal opinions aside, Intuit started as a small company in the Nineties and grew to be a huge company by doing things right, by listening to their customers. I saw an issue who's off handed fix (upgrade) did not set well with me. And insofar as my personal opinion is concerned, people as well as Companies learn more from critical remarks, than they do from complimentary ones. The ISP is "tds.net" who in April changed from in-house tds.net server to Google's smtp.gmail.com. This obviously brought along more restrictions, and settings needed to be changed in Outlook Express, but not Powerchurch. For months the program (Powerchurch) responded beautifully, and then one Sunday months later quit connecting, presumably because Google kept tweaking their restrictions. Yes the port :465 was added but had no effect.

Again, my personal opinion. Note, the 'offhanded fix to upgrade' was my advice, and not only based on the email issue of SSL, but because of all the new functionality the upgrade brings. And I know Intuit started as a small company, I was using Quicken DOS back in the early 90's, along with Turbo Tax. Intuit did do their normal fixes of problems, with some incremental updates in the fixes back then, as does Powerchurch. However, their potential customer base, even in the 90's, is much larger than for Powerchurch, and when Intuit went public in the 90's there they did quite well with the IPO with an infusion of millions.

Powerchurch has learned from critical remarks. Many of the changes that have been incorporated in the last three versions (9, 10 and 10.4) have been due to users asking for functionality, and getting it as part of a Maintenance Release. There could be a very good reason why SSL functionality was not added as part of a MR to version 9. One I can think of is that version 9 was written on an earlier version of FoxPro, one that a newer SMTP library containing SSL code will not work on.

That said. in doing some research at the Google GMAIL site, it seems that a few people are having problems with Gmail, and it started around the 8th of Sept. Mail from Macs and iPhones no longer works, along with some other issues. I'm finding a few interesting things about Gmail:

1. Gmail SMTP server has a limit of 100 recipients at a time, 500 total recipients per day.
2. If you're using 465, that's an SSL port only, you should be using 587 with standard verification. I no longer have a version 9 setup here to see if it has an TLS setting or not. If it does use TLS, if it doesn't try without it. The advice is also that port 25 (standard SMTP port) should be available for use.

FWIW ... my church doesn't use our ISP's email system. We have our email setup through our web domain host, which doesn't have a limitation on the number of emails sent out per day.

Finally, I would still try to see if you could test the beta, and see if that will fix your issue.