"An error ocurred while sending mail ..." Thunderbird 3.1.9

[ChrisGreaves]

Nothing has changed since 20th Dec 2010.
I haven't changed Thunderbird in the last 2 months (I'm hedging, I seem to recall being nudged into a "better version").
My email contacts remain the same, friends and colleagues of 20+ years etc etc etc.
For the past 9 days, about one out of every ten emails going out generates this pop-up:

1.png

I phone the outsourced tech support at the ISP (rogers.com) who tell me that they don't support Mozilla Thunderbird as a client, try Outlook.
(of course, they've been happily taking money off me while Mozilla Thunderbird has been working ...)
I issue the offending emails in Outlook 2003 and all but one goes through.
It's the weekend so I fuggetaboutit and am resolved to make this issue my top priority today (Monday).
I've issued a half-dozen "failed" emails through my Gmail account.
I'm not happy about using my Rogers or Gmail account, because a change in "from" and layout confuses people.

Just on the off chance that the ISP is correct, is it possible that Mozilla Thunderbird has updated itself, or added some freaky security measure?
The latest email NOT to go through was a simple paste of a URL of the Toronto Star to a colleague; I do this all the time - email a link to an article "that might interest you". I'm not aware that I'm suddenly indulging in risky behavior.

I'm puzzled too because most of these thwarted emails are not going to yahoo or to gmail accounts; they go to owned-domain accounts (as in " ... @ChrisGreaves.com")

My tactic for today is to continue issuing emails through TBird, and at any stoppage, re-issue through Outlook 2003 to see if i can't get outlook to pop up the same/similar message.

[ChrisGreaves]

Nothing has changed since 20th Dec 2010.

Second thoughts:
I suppose it might be a part of MSE of AVG forcing its way into the party?

[Claude]

have you tried disabling AVG's outgoing email scanning ?

[ChrisGreaves]

have you tried disabling AVG's outgoing email scanning ?

Not yet, but this is such a frustrating issue (for me) that I'm going to Uninstall AVG and leave it off the machine for the duration.
Thanks for the idea.

[Claude]

I wouldn't uninstall AVG just because of that problem.

Do you get any error messages? If so, can you post them please ?

[ChrisGreaves]

I wouldn't uninstall AVG just because of that problem. Do you get any error messages? If so, can you post them please ?

Too Late! It's gone! (easy enough to re-install)

Claude, I'm a great believer in the old divide-and-conquer method, and I thought that your suggestion of AVG was a good one.

I'll be spending a regular day here, emailing in and out, so this will be a good test.
I'll give it a day, then re-install AVG.
If the problem re-appears after that, I'll disable "AVG's outgoing email scanning" as a finer-tuning of the divide-and-conquer.
FWIW I am sure I did not have that enabled. I really think my system is pretty secure and free of bugs/viruses etc. and for that reason I think I'd checked it off.

RevoUninstalling AVG, then carefully re-installing it is a good control, it seems to me. I suspect you think it is overkill, but I have spent too much time trying to get emails out over the past few days.
(I miss the BBS days when your local supplier lived in the same street ...)

Thanks for the guidance.


I rather suspect that the ISP is playing with code-that-was-working, but they won't admit that they've screwed up. The old "Oh, we only support Outlook" is what they fall back to when a tree topples or the government changes or I bake a loaf of bread or ...

[ChrisGreaves]

Do you get any error messages? If so, can you post them please ?

Hi Claude. I squoke too soon:-

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I RevoUninstalled AVG, then rebooted.
I have issued 7 emails successfully on my regular sort of tasks (nothing fancy like a sample EXE with a virus in it or anything executable).
The eighth email failed; a regular 3-line text-only, no attachment, memo type of email.
The first pop-up box shows.
I click on OK.
The second pop-up box shows.
I am back in the email.
I save the email in my Drafts folder, and I sulk.

[DaveA]

Have all of these failed emails been to a yahoo address?

Have any of the completed emails been to a yahoo address?

It appears to me that your email server has been blocked by the postmaster at yahoo.com.

The rogers.com message just may be the result of to many failures at sending to a yahoo server.

[ChrisGreaves]

Have all of these failed emails been to a yahoo address?
Have any of the completed emails been to a yahoo address?
It appears to me that your email server has been blocked by the postmaster at yahoo.com.
The rogers.com message just may be the result of to many failures at sending to a yahoo server.

Hi Dave.
I have searched my Sent folder for the month of June; I have only one correspondent with a yahoo.com address, Norma, and no emails have gone missing there.
The closest failed message I've got was not to a Yahoo, but to a GMail address (image of header attached).

I don't understand the stuff within, but it looks to me as if Rogers is using some part of Yahoo to process their mail.
That is, in part, my foundation for thinking that Rogers has screwed up.
Dick, of Dick's Blog, is the only GMail address to fail.
All other failed emails are going to regular and established domains, such as @EllwoodAssociates, @APLBorealis and so on, and they are to people I've been communicating for months, in some cases years.

I had ONE resent-via-Outlook failure a couple of days ago.
I am now waiting like the proverbial cat-on-mouse for it to happen again, at which time I shall pounce.

[PaulB]

Chris, I would suspect that this is a Rogers/Yahoo problem. Rogers partners with Yahoo to provide internet content and services, just like Bell Sympatico partners with MSN. I would get on to Rogers about their mail delivery problem, not your nonexistent mail client problem. I don't believe Thunderbird is the issue here.

I have not had any issues with Thunderbird recently. I am using ver. 3.1.10 to your 3.1.9, however. This would indicate that your Thunderbird is not set to automatically update itself.

[Bigaldoc]

I believe the fellas have got you onto something here, Chris. You may remember that I use MailWasher Pro as my email receiving "front-end."

I have four email accounts, among which is a Yahoo account. Every day, several times a day, MailWasher yield an error that it is unable to reach the Yahoo server to check my mail. I have it checked every 10 minutes and it fails VERY FREQUENTLY with Yahoo.

I don't know if this couples with the fact that Yahoo made some MAJOR modifications recently that negated my ability to synch my Yahoo calendar and email with my Blackberry handheld.

Looks to me like the finger is pointing in Yahoo's direction. Hard to prove though... Good luck!

[ChrisGreaves]

Chris, I would suspect that this is a Rogers/Yahoo problem.

Hi Paul.
"meanwhile, back at the ranch ...".
I dug out the failed Rogers email.
This was sent using Outlook through my Rogers account on Saturday.
I'll click "Submit" and then pick up the phone ...

[DaveA]

The posted properties of the email, show that you are sending a illegal attachment.
What type of attachment are you sending?

What info do you get when you go to the link following the phrase about illegal attachment?

[ChrisGreaves]

The posted properties of the email, show that you are sending a illegal attachment. What type of attachment are you sending?

Nothing illegal. A zip file with a couple of *.dot, I've sent those often enough before. In one case a PDF printed with Primo PDF Writer.

What info do you get when you go to the link following the phrase about illegal attachment?

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/abuse_smtp.html
You get to fill out a form, which the ISP suggested I do, yesterday. I did. Theory is they (Yahoo) get back to me in 24 hours. Practice is a little different.
I am still recovering mentally and physically from 2 hours on the phone with ISP yesterday afternoon. Amongst other suggestions that I was infected with a virus, that MSE and Grisoft weren't foolproof (is anything?), and that I should get things rolling by reformatting my hard drive.

More to follow.

[Bigaldoc]

Sorry Chris, but I'm ROFL over that asinine suggestion that you format your drive. Who in God's name hires and trains these idiots anyway. Sorry...

[jonwallace]

Chris, have you maybe fallen foul of some sort of antispam limit set by your isp by sending too many emails in too short a time?

[ChrisGreaves]

Sorry Chris, but I'm ROFL over that asinine suggestion that you format your drive. Who in God's name hires and trains these idiots anyway. Sorry...

That's not what has taken me so long to recover, physically and mentally.
It was her suggestion that I hire a technician to eradicate the virii. I'm thinking, who do *I* hire, since others hire me?

[ChrisGreaves]

Chris, have you maybe fallen foul of some sort of antispam limit set by your isp by sending too many emails in too short a time?

Ho Jon.
Not through volume. My volumes and patterns are pretty recognizable. 262 emails in and out so far this month, that is, about 20 per day. Typical for me. I have MailWasher check email every 2 hours, so a burst comes in, a burst of perhaps 5 goes out, then silence.

I have noticed emails coming from CGreaves@ChrisGreaves.com, i.e. me, and I rather suspect that one of my idiot ex-friends, who became an ex-friend after cc'ing me along with 70 million others has become a bot machine, so that people around the world are getting spam emails from "me", and are reporting "me" as an offender.

That is, I have been blacklisted until proven innocent.

The situation is made worse by my ISP Rogers partnership with Yahoo, i.e. abdication of responsibility.
Yahoo blacklists me, and their partner, Rogers, is happy enough to take money off me, but then says they have no control over what there partner in crime does.

[ChrisGreaves]

My tactic for today is to continue issuing emails through TBird, and at any stoppage, re-issue through Outlook 2003 to see if I can't get outlook to pop up the same/similar message.

I'm not sure what use this PrtScr is, but it illustrates which end of my wit I'm at this morning.

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This is a plain-text message, and typical of 80% or more of my outgoing mail on a work day (i.e. Monday through Sunday)
I am replying to Aaron.
Aaron had replied to my email of 3 hours ago.
My email of 3 hours ago went out through Thunderbird in reply to an even earlier email from Aaron, and this reply had a 179KB PDF attachment, unzipped.
So at 7:00 I can reply via TBird to an email and attach a file and it goes through.
At 9:50 a.m. I can't reply via TBird (without an attachment!) to an email.
At 9:55 a.m., by pasting the To:, Subject: and Body into Outlook 2003 I can issue my reply in a timely but labour-intensive manner.

Both Thunderbird and Outlook are configured to issue emails via the SMTP of my only ISP; from my point of view both TBird and Outlook are sending emails down the same narrow pipeline, out of the same account.
If Yahoo was inspecting the content of the header I would have bet Lunch at The Montreal Deli on Yahoo inhibiting the OUTLOOK-client origin rather than the TBird, on the grounds that Outlook is a more suitable/likely vehicle for spamming, botting and all that merde.
Pardon my French.

Now the ISP/chat operative did change some ports etc in my Outlook, too fast for me to see, and the ISP/phone operative suggested I make the same changes in TBird, which I have not yet done. I spent yesterday with a lawyer, sadly, reorganizing his office systems rather than plotting on how to get me off a murder charge should I ever bump into one of these Yahoos.
Not that I'm bitter or anything.

So, this afternoon, once I've poured my first cuppa, I'm going to compare my Outlook and TBird setups, record/preserve the TBird and make changes.

The odd thing is that the ISP/phone operative said that they'd changed ports 5 years ago, which way-away pre-dates my installation last December of this Notebook.
I've been humming along just fine on whatever I'd set up in TBird.

Until 2 weeks ago.
Would that I could regain my youth.

[ChrisGreaves]

What info do you get when you go to the link following the phrase about illegal attachment?

10 minutes ago:

Hello Chris,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Mail.

Unfortunately, it appears that your report to us was missing the full
body of the message. Without the full body of the message, we will be
unable to further investigate this matter.

Please forward a copy of the message in its entirety. Our system
currently does not allow us to view attachments.

Please include the following in your report of mail abuse to assist us
in a prompt and full evaluation:

1. Original subject line - Please forward the email with a subject
identical to the original subject.

2. Complete headers - Email programs often display abbreviated headers.
To learn how to display the full headers in a Yahoo! Mail account,
please visit the Yahoo! Mail Help Desk at:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/y ... cs-31.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

If you are using a different client to read your email, please consult
your email program's help system for more information on viewing full
headers.

3. Complete message body - Please include the complete, unedited content
of the email message in question. Please do not change or edit the
message in any way.

If we are missing any one of these three items, it may take longer for
the Yahoo! Mail Abuse Team to properly investigate and take appropriate
action. We appreciate your efforts in reporting this abuse to Yahoo!.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Mail. Your case number for this
issue is ********. Please reference it in all future communication about
this particular issue.

Regards,

Yahoo! Customer Care


I have no header information, because this is an outgoing message rejected, not an incoming message with problems.
That is, I have nothing to show except what I am trying to send.
I have sent off a "full body" of an failed message.
Let's see what happens.