Be Excellent To Each Other

Okay so I successfully e-mail mail merged a load of stuff. Hurrah!

They go over to Outlook and start sending. Hurrah!

Except none of them actually send.

I just get this for all of the emails I try to send:

"The following recipient(s) cannot be reached:

'[email protected]' on 23/06/2008 08:59
503 Valid RCPT command must precede DATA"

Any ideas?

I can send emails no problem traditionally but when mail merging it doesn't work.

RCPT is the 'recipient' header field; it looks like the mailmerge has generated invalid stuff. It's impossible for me to be any more help without being able to poke around, being your "general, fading awareness of the lower-level stuff from years ago, but almost no knowledge of Office/Outlook, especially recent versions" type.

If I provided more information might you be able to help?

I assume the To list, if it is a list of separate addresses, has them all separated by a semi-colon?

Hmm. I'd better check the spreadsheet to see if there's anything obviously wrong in there.

To give a little more info, I've got a list of orders and email addresses etc and merge those together to make lots of separate emails. There's a few other details merged into the emails.

I've just checked the sent emails and everything looks okay there.

It seems now that outlook isn't sending at all now. Yet it's able to send a test message okay.

The message you receive - are you getting that as a mail in your inbox, or as a popup in Outlook? Because to me that looks like a rejection message from your mail server, rather than an issue within outlook itself.

It's coming into the inbox but it's coming at the exact same time as I send the mail. Or like a fraction of a second afterwards. I can send perfectly fine in Thunderbird. The outlook test email works fine as well.

OK - 503 is definitely an SMTP error, so it's your server rejecting it. A quick google reveals that the error usually means that the outgoing mail server requires authentication. It could be that it only requires authentication for several mails at once, to avoid your machine being used as a spambot.

Go into the account settings in outlook, look under the outgoing mail server settings, and see if "My Outgoing Server Requires Authentication" is checked. If not, check it and try again.

I'd tried that already and it didn't seem to work. I'd had a username and password in there for SMTP from the start but didn't have the secure thing on. So I tried ticking 'secure' and that made no difference either. It won't allow me to send individual mails now either.

Is there any way I can export the mails and try sending them with Thunderbird instead? Office won't export to thunderbird of course.

I've got it working now by deleting all the details and entering it all again from scratch. Maybe I'd made some typo somewhere. Thanks anyway people for all your excellent help.

I used to get that error - I think it was something to do with the mail account having to authenticate before sending so I had to tick an option somewhere to tell it to do a receive before sending, or something along those lines.. I've not used Outlook at home for a while.

I have some more questions..

Firstly, does anyone know how I could have my lists or database of orders update automatically with new ones? That is to say, when I have some more orders, they will be added on the end and not just replace the entire thing, eradicating all old ones.

Secondly, would there be any way to get it to identify items with the same order number and add them to the same packing slip?

Thirdly, why does word at a hugely small decimal onto my prices? Say the price in the original spreadsheet is £2.94, when mail merging word makes it £2.9400000000000004 or something similar. This is quite perplexing. (Though I've solved it by changing to an older workbook format)

For all of my orders there are few enough to just copy and paste them into a word template, otherwise what I'd do is create a dynamic webpage that does everything you want word to do, but is far too tedious to set up in Word. If you're capable with php you could whip up a nice label template in minutes

Floating point numbers are inherently inaccurate. It's possible that 2.94 is impossible to express as a floating point number, and 2.9400000000000004 is the closest it can get. Either that or word is shit.

I'm dealing with order volumes of around 80 a day right now. Amazon provide packing labels but they aren't that good. I can manually organise the data but it would be handy for it to be done automatically.

Hello! I'm afraid I have absolutely no idea about your mail troubles.


I'm afraid I don't know what you mean here. Could you explain it in a different way?



Hmm... if you're mail merging, all you can do is show the result of formatting one record at a time. Word processors usually have the option of concatenating several mail merges into a single document (with page breaks that can be replaced later), but you won't be able to easily have a super dynamic page of 'everything to do with record 1', 'everything to do with record 2' without writing a kind of macro that creates pages on demand.



That's the floating point thing, yep... do you know what datatypes you're using? If you know how your tables are designed, maybe you could alter them to either store integer values, or at least spew integer values toward your document. (With Word/Access, I'd make an Access Query (a View) that formats and converts to the datatypes I need, and then use that in the mail merge.)

Sorry I can't help you more... MM is only really for simple automatic stuff. In this situation, I'd start looking towards some kind of really simple PHP/mySQL system that spews out formatted tables showing what I want.