E-mail - SMTP settings deactivated

Support
1

Hi there

After several months of this working correctly and with no intervention from ourselves, the system has deactivated it. I’ve just been sent an e-mail along these lines:

We have been unable to send a number of items through your own custom SMTP email server. The last 3 consecutive attempts failed. The error recorded is as follows:

Email: accounts@REDACTED Error: An invalid character was found in the mail header: ‘]’.
Please return to the SMTP settings page on your QuickFile account (Account Settings Area). If you have recently changed your email password or any other credentials please update and reactivate your SMTP services accordingly.

I’ve not touched the settings in any way whatsoever which leads me to suspect there’s a bug somewhere.

Could someone please confirm?

Many thanks!

2

Hi @ForceOne

I’ve just taken a look at this for you and I think I see the issue.

Invoice 1320 was sent to the client earlier today, but the email address recorded contains a squared bracket ‘]’. This seems to relate to the message you’ve seen too.

Could you try removing this bracket please, and reactivating your SMTP settings?

3

Good spot, thanks very much!

I think some validation on the e-mail field would be useful here as typos happen :slight_smile:

Thanks again

4

No problem! :slight_smile:

I’ll certainly make this recommendation to our dev team

5

You’d be surprised what counts as a valid email address according to the specifications… The only way to truly validate an email address is to try sending a message to it and getting the recipient to click a link, but that doesn’t really work in situations like this.

3 Likes
6

Or as a slightly less rigid check you could at least just check the domain has a valid MX record.

No matter how clever or rigorous you are with email validation it will always end up disallowing valid names somewhere along the line.

7

I’ve also had some issues with SMTP settings being deactivated

forgot about it but having seen this post I went to look again and it shows this:-

It’s been several months but most emails still seem to be delivered.

When I tried entering another email address for the “Send activation email to” I get this message

Do I need to speak to my IT or is there something simple I am missing?

8

Hi @AnythingLegal

Both myself and my colleague have just tried to send a test email from your account but didn’t receive an error message. But neither did we receive the email.

I think you may need to speak to your email provider in this case as they are likely to see any errors being reported or advise on what needs to be done to enable it.

If you leave the SMTP credentials your emails will just default to our own server, so your customer’s won’t have any problem receiving these.

9

Hi - I’m having the same issue with the “we have been unable to send a number of items through your own custom SMTP email server”. It’s been working fine since I joined QuickFile last year, and all of a sudden it stopped. I thought it was a fault with the 2FA password, so I deleted that and set it up all over again. Still didn’t work. I’ve been in touch with IT support for my mail provider and they can’t find a fault, nor have they logged any error messages at their end. Can anyone help? Thanks