Guest newtonmj Posted April 8, 2007 Report Share Posted April 8, 2007 (edited) I was away on business recently with my M600 as my sole means of communication back to the office... and, typically, in just such a mission-critical situation I started having seemingly random problems sending e-mails... I've seen similar reports in the forums and so thought I'd post my solution for anyone else's benefit. The symptoms were, when trying to send e-mails to definitely-correct addresses, they would immediately fail with the following: From: System Administrator Subject: Invalid message recipients Your message '' was not set and has been moved to the Drafts folder. The following recipients are invalid: Now, given I run my own mail server I knew this error did not come directly (verbatim) from my mail server hence it must've been Outlook's interpretation of whatever the true error was (thanks MS - if Bill is reading this(!) do us a favour and leave error messages alone would you?!) Repeated Send/Receive attempts would still fail, yet if I re-wrote a message to the same recipient it would sometimes send but often just join my pile in the Drafts folder.... So I decided to check the mail server logs to check firstly that Outlook was connecting and, if so, what had happened. It turned out it was indeed connecting but it was making no attempt to authenticate.... why? I double-checked my Outlook account settings and confirmed that 'Outgoing mail requires authentication' was checked. I had 'Use seperate settings' unchecked because my SMTP username/password are the same system credentials as those for my incoming IMAP. Indeed it had worked quite happily so far that week... Out of curiosity I ticked 'Use seperate settings' anyway and entered my username/password just for good measure.... This time the messages sent.... but why now? As mentioned, my incoming/outgoing credentials are the same and Outlook was able to login to my IMAP account fine with them and the settings at both ends had not been touched for months. So, I unchecked 'Use seperate settings' again (i.e. back to where I was before) to reproduce the error but everything continued working fine... Evidently a transient bug then. Hence a working fix is as mentioned - tick 'use seperate settings' and enter your username/password (even though as mentioned they might be the same as those for the incoming account). Perhaps even leaving this setup fully completed may completely avoid the issue (but mine is now back to using the original settings and I haven't seen the problem again) so it's hard to determine with certainty. All in all, the bottom line is don't necessarrily take 'invalid message recipients' to literally mean what you might think - it could well actually be a '554 Relay access denied' error as was my case (which would've immediately given me a clue). More to the point, be aware of the potential for Outlook to 'forget' to authenticate... Of course, it could genuinely be an invalid message recipient (perhaps wrongly formatted).... Or maybe you haven't set it to authenticate when you need to... but if you're sure you're configured correctly now you know it might not be your fault and how to work around it... Why oh why can't Outlook tell us the real SMTP error?! I was fortunate to have access to the mail server logs otherwise I'd probably still be scratching my head now... Mathew Edited April 9, 2007 by newtonmj Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Confucious Posted April 9, 2007 Report Share Posted April 9, 2007 Thanks Mathew - not had this error myself - yet! Always handy to know the solution before the problem arises tho! Thanks for taking the time to post. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest smatt79 Posted April 20, 2007 Report Share Posted April 20, 2007 I've been struggling with this issue for days! I am receiving this same error message but only on mail leaving the domain (internal mail is delivered fine). Unfortunately this fix did not work :D Any other suggestions? ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest newtonmj Posted April 20, 2007 Report Share Posted April 20, 2007 (edited) Given that local mail is fine then's it's definitely a relaying issue which can only mean one thing - authentication problems (assuming the server is correctly configured to send mail to other domains?) In my case it was Outlook 'forgetting' but in yours it sounds like it's not doing it correctly full stop (not necessarilly its fault). Has it ever worked? Do you have access to the server logs? Or does this belong to your ISP? Either way, what sort of authentication is required? SMTP AUTH with username/password? Any TLS tunneling? POP-before-SMTP? If you provide some further background details we should be able to sort this out. What's the address of the SMTP server? (PM me this if you'd prefer) Mathew Edited April 20, 2007 by newtonmj Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest PayableOnDeath Posted May 8, 2007 Report Share Posted May 8, 2007 hi I have had this problem a few but its was fine sending emails to other domains on a differnet webserver but wouldnt send to domains on the local webserver, lucky i could get to the logs of the mail server, turns out on local mail it was marking as spam and rejecting the email and outlook gave me the 'invalid message recipients' marked my wizard ip as whitelisted and its working ok now. just thought i would post about this incase others are having the same problem as i had like Mathew said, why can Pocket outlook leave the error message intact, it would save hours of trying to work out what the problem is Regards David Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest veggiecar300 Posted May 16, 2007 Report Share Posted May 16, 2007 Thanks for the post.I had this same problem and tried your fix. Problem was, that as soon as I ticked "outgoing mail requires authentication" it gave me another error message when trying to send email: "messages cannot be downloaded to your mobile device..." whether I checked the "require ssl" or not.I've gotten this error message ("messages cannot be downloaded to your mobile device") before, and it has nothing to do with dl'ing messages. It actually means it won't send email. I had fixed the problem previously by un-checking the "outgoing mail requires authentication."the frustrating part of all this is that I have gotten the whole thing to work properly the first time around. It's as if my device is learning the settings I've changed to stay ahead enough to NOT work... as if it's intentionally trying to piss me off.I've had troubles like this with my old palm os treo, but not like this. can you help me sort it out?device: treo700wx, my own mail server Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest newtonmj Posted May 16, 2007 Report Share Posted May 16, 2007 as if it's intentionally trying to piss me off. Sounds about right! If you're running your own mail server then we have a good chance of sorting it out... What authentication methods does the server accept? Does it insist on TLS? Of course the logs will be of great help, particularly if we can increase the verbosity. Let me know further details and we can take it from there... You say that 'messages cannot be downloaded to your mobile device' has nothing to do with downloading messages to the device - you sure about that? Remember it will attempt a POP/IMAP download before sending any mail and it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if it falls over and stops if this first stage fails for whatever reason. Mathew Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest veggiecar300 Posted May 16, 2007 Report Share Posted May 16, 2007 I'm sorry. I don't know how to look up the email logs. I took a look through the options on my control panel for my server and didn't see anything. What might these logs be called?I do have more info that might help though. I changed the address for the incoming and outgoing mail servers slightly. First time, I changed them from domainname.com to mail.domainname.com and every thing worked right for 1 send/receive. Second send/recieve : same problem. So, I then changed the incoming and outgoing servers to domainname.com:2095 and everything worked for 1 send/receive... second send/recieve: same problem. THEN I changed the incoming and outgoing mail server settings to subdomain.domainname.com and everything worked... for 1 send/receive... second send/receive = same error message.THe weird thing is that I can always get new incoming messages dl'ed on my device. But, I can only successfully send messages after a change to the settings for one send/receive. help me find more info so I can lick this problem.thanks so much for your quick reply. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest newtonmj Posted May 17, 2007 Report Share Posted May 17, 2007 What mail server software are you using, and what platform is it running on? If you could tell me the names of the server I could find out for myself, and also investigate what authentication it is expecting. It sounds very strange you're using port 2095.... Mathew Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest veggiecar300 Posted May 17, 2007 Report Share Posted May 17, 2007 I think I may actually have solved this problem!!I am a little hesitant, because it wouldn't be the first time I thought I had it licked and the problem resurfaces... but I've tested it several times now and it seems to work.When you set up an account on the treo700wx, all of the settings are reached through the "accounts" tab at the bottom of the "options" screen. After you have your accounts set up properly go to the options screen and click on the "addresses" tab. There you will find an option that reads, "In contacts, get email messages from:" CHANGE THIS OPTION TO "NONE."Now, the downside that I've noticed in my tests is that you will get an error message after sending each message. "Cannot recognize one or more recipients or the address is not valid. Would you like to send the message anyway?" Click yes. When you hit send/receive the message will go through properly regardless of that annoying message.Now the question is: why? Is Sprint or Palm or Windows blocking the use of outside pop3 emails? There must be some kind of address authentication program in there that doesn't work. It only seems to kick in after a few send/recieves. The only solution I've found is to disable it as described above. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest newtonmj Posted May 17, 2007 Report Share Posted May 17, 2007 I believe that option is for address verification against your contacts list, however for fully qualified addresses (i.e. those with an @domain portion) I am surprised this is causing the messages to fail... But then this is Pocket Outlook and as we've discussed above nothing really should be that surprising! Finger's crossed it's fixed for good! Mathew Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest veggiecar300 Posted May 17, 2007 Report Share Posted May 17, 2007 Nope, false alarm. I can only send messages to the different email addresses in my own server. I still get that error email with all emails going out to anything else (gmail, hotmail, etc.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest newtonmj Posted May 18, 2007 Report Share Posted May 18, 2007 That is definitely an authentication issue then... What outgoing mail server are you using? Mathew Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest veggiecar300 Posted May 26, 2007 Report Share Posted May 26, 2007 Well, seems like this was all my own stupid fault. I didn't follow the instructions on my mail server for getting and sending emails with pop3/smtp. At least I didn't follow them to the letter. Strange things I needed to do though: for example use a username like myname+anydomain.com (instead of [email protected]) Well,,, you know what they say: "if all else fails, read the directions." Thanks for your help and sorry I wasted your time with this. At least I am satisfied that the Treo700wx does actually do what it should in this case without having to buy into some service or program. On a semi-related note: has anyone noticed that you can send email from different addresses on gmail - but not when you are on a mobile device? When I am on my Windows Mobile device I can't send email from different addresses on gmail - whether or not I am on the mobile gmail version. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Please sign in to comment
You will be able to leave a comment after signing in
Sign In Now