Error when emailing from Powerchurch

[NeilZ]

Our system uses Outlook, but 3 out of 6 recipients did not get the email, this bounced back to the office:

Your message contains invalid characters (bare line feed characters) which the email servers at sbcglobal.net don't support.
admin Office 365 xxxxxxx
Action Required Recipient

Bare line feeds unsupported

How to Fix It
It appears that your email program added invalid characters (bare line feed characters) into your message when you sent it. Try using a different email program to send your message. If the problem continues send this non-delivery report (NDR) message to your email admin for assistance.

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The other recipients had an ISP of ATT.NET.

This is a new issue, as we've used the email creation system in Powerchurch previously without issues.

Neil

[Zorak]

ATT and sbcglobal (along with a bunch of others) are Yahoo behind the scenes, so it makes sense that they would fail together.

In looking through the code, the only line break that is being manually added in code is when sending HTML emails, it adds the "<DOCTYPE html>" at the top of the file, followed by "CHR(10)+CHR(13)", which is a Carriage Return and Line Feed. The rest of the content of the email, whether plain text or HTML, is coming straight from the textbox where the message is typed. I then went and verified that the textbox control isn't doing any reformatting of anything.

Was the message you sent plain text or HTML? Did you manually type the message body in the textbox or was it copied and pasted from elsewhere?
Thousands of emails are sent from PowerChurch every day, likely tens of thousands, so something strange is afoot somewhere in the mix.

[NeilZ]

ATT and sbcglobal (along with a bunch of others) are Yahoo behind the scenes, so it makes sense that they would fail together.

In looking through the code, the only line break that is being manually added in code is when sending HTML emails, it adds the "<DOCTYPE html>" at the top of the file, followed by "CHR(10)+CHR(13)", which is a Carriage Return and Line Feed. The rest of the content of the email, whether plain text or HTML, is coming straight from the textbox where the message is typed. I then went and verified that the textbox control isn't doing any reformatting of anything.

Was the message you sent plain text or HTML? Did you manually type the message body in the textbox or was it copied and pasted from elsewhere?
Thousands of emails are sent from PowerChurch every day, likely tens of thousands, so something strange is afoot somewhere in the mix.

OK ... that figures. I first sent the email, entered directly into the screen, using HTML, that came back with that error. As a second test, I entered another message the same way, first tagged it as HTML, realized I needed to test it as text, so switched to that. That may have left some artifact from the HTML, this test bounced.

Also, It had a PDF attachment, that shouldn't affect it.

[NeilZ]

We finally figured out what was happening. The antivirus was set to scan incoming and outgoing emails, normally not a problem, but it was also set to leave a 'scanned by' signature at the bottom of the email for those going out.

When outgoing scans were turned off, the error did not appear. I suspect that a change in the antivirus caused this, as we've been using that for a few years without an issue.

[Zorak]

Thanks for posting the update here. Hopefully no one has that problem in the future, but if they do, we know the first step to try.