For the last couple of weeks I’ve been getting emails from Quickfile saying my SMTP settings have been deactivated because “three consecutive attempts failed” and the operation timed out. I manage to reactivate successfully and all seems well. Today I received the same email at the same time as an invoice successfully arrived in the inbox, suggesting the SMTP settings are fine. All the settings are correct (and I’ve toggled the secure connection checkbox to see if that makes a difference).
Is this a bug with Quickfile or do I need to speak to my email providers?
It may be worth having a chat with your email provider.
From what you’ve said, it sounds like the connection is timing out when we’re attempting to connect and send the email, but the email server is still accepting the request and sending the email all OK, hence the mixed messages.
I’d imagine your email provider would have some logs on this.
Thanks for your reply @QFMathew I’ll contact them and see what they say. As far as I know they don’t use cPanel. I use Fasthosts as an email provider and it’s not uncommon to have issues.
Exactly the same thing happening with us and we also use Fasthosts. Settings deactivated again today. Have to go in, reactivate and ok for a while again. No problems at all for us until a couple of weeks ago. Fasthosts have made changes to their email recently (e.g. they now have spam filtering) so it is probably something that has crept in with the changes.
@datapartners, please post if you find anything out. We will investigate further in the new year.
@QFMathew, what is quickest way to tell if email has been successfully sent? In your message you say the email is being successfully sent. How can one tell?
The email should always be sent. If the SMTP gains, we fall back to the default setup.
If you have a power user subscription you can go to Account Settings >> All Settings >> Sent email log. This will show all emails sent from your account. If you go into an email itself it’ll tell you if it uses SMTP or not.
As mentioned above, with the SMTP setup failing, we seem to receive the timeout suggesting it’s failed.
Thank you, @QFMathew. Our log shows some emails ‘FAILED’ with 10sec processing time. It looks like this 10sec is a threshold beyond which failure is decided and it appears to correspond to when our QF SMTP settings get deactivated (not sure where the 3 attempts relate to timing as the log does not indicate).
I see we have recently had emails sent successfully after a range of processing times, including as much as 9secs. Before 3rd Dec, it appears max processing time was no more than 3sec for any emails. So something has changed, almost definitely with Fasthosts. The long times relate only to the logged lines showing an email sent to the customer’s email address (SMTP is listed as the Fasthosts server), not with copies sent to our own, which are much quicker (when email SMTP is listed as SESAPI). Does all this still indicate it is our email provider who we should be chasing, or is it that QF determines the 10sec timeout and it might be sensible to increase it?
Forgive my lack of knowledge in this area but, if our email provider, what technical details can we actually tell them and complain about? Thank you.
Look online for an example of a php mail script, a simple one will do. Copy it place your mail details and save as a php file. Upload to your server and go to the url location of the file. Send yourself an email and see how long it takes. That would be the easiest way to determine if it’s fashosts or not.
I’ve been in touch with fasthosts and they typically say there are no issues and it is more likely a problem with Quickfile. We don’t get any issues with sending via any other platform (I use the same SMTP details in Gmail for example). I had another timeout alert this morning and, looking at the sent mail log, all emails have been successfully sent with a response time of 0.6, 0.1, 0.2 seconds.
We don’t get any issues with sending via any other platform (I use the same SMTP details in Gmail for example). I had another timeout alert this morning and, looking at the sent mail log, all emails have been successfully sent with a response time of 0.6, 0.1, 0.2 seconds.