Emailing referral form times out

[brentwood]

Recently I updated to 12.4.31.0, emailing referral form will get me "The operation has timed out." message. I didn't change the smtp server setting. I can send emails through the "E-mail" button on tool bar. So that tells me that Open Dental can talk to the smtp server of the ISP just like before. Can anyone tell me what went wrong? One thing interesting is that I don't have this problem with the backup copy at home. I will call support later if I cannot get this resolved.Thanks for your help.

[jsalmon]

I'm curious if the email would time out from the "E-main" button on the tool bar if you manually added the referral pdf as an attachment. Since it doesn't happen at home, it won't hurt to make sure your antivirus software at work isn't blocking it from going out. I would make sure that OpenDental.exe is added to it's list of trusted applications.

[brentwood]

Thanks for the quick response. I saved the referral form as a pdf and then tried to send it as you suggested. But it still failed. It looks like it is the problem with attachments. Now I use web-mail interface from our ISP to send the referral form in a browser. But the mechanism is definitely different from what Open Dental does. I use the same anti-virus program at home and at work (AVG). I will search around to see if there are any settings I can change. So based on the source code, what causes the message to come out?

I just disabled anti-virus program. The problem still happens. So it may not be anti-virus program. Besides, I checked the settings of the anti-virus program. It looks like I am not blocking any outgoing emails with attachments. Thanks.

[jsalmon]

E-mail within Open Dental is sent with Microsoft .NET's "Mail" namespace (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... .mail.aspx). However, we recently added some code to support implicit SSL ports in v12.4.28. I do not believe this to be the cause of your problem (mainly because you don't have a problem at home) but to be sure, I would like to know a couple of settings that you have. In Setup > Email, what SMTP Server and Port are you using?

[brentwood]

smtp server: smtp.1and1.com
port: 587
SSL: on

This is the same setting as I have on my iPhone. I played with SSL settings. It doesn't help. It was off. Thanks.

[Rickliftig]

Same thing here - just started happening

[brentwood]

I use same .NET "Mail" to send appointment reminders with the same smtp setting. I don't have problems. It looks like we get "SmtpException" and you just throw the exception message to the screen. The default SmtpClient.Timeout is 100 seconds. But it seems that the exception happens before that. Unless you deliberately set it to a shorter value, which I don't think so, setting it to a bigger value won't solve the problem.

By the way, could you also fix the bug that you always save a record in EmailAttachments folder even we click "cancel" button in email dialog or sending fails in this case? It is a minor bug, but it just adds up unnecessary storage. Thanks.

[KCalla]

I just discovered that we are having the same problem.

[KCalla]

I just got off the phone with Randy at Open Dental. He was able to solve this email timing out problem for me by changing the port to 465. We left SSL unchecked, despite me using Gmail. It had been successful for me in the past with the SSL unchecked, as well.
Hope this helps someone else. Now I'll go through yesterday's patients and see whose consults I failed to notice timing out

[Rickliftig]

So that worked here also, but Jason, please educate us- what changed here? It was working fine last week.

[jsalmon]

I use same .NET "Mail" to send appointment reminders with the same smtp setting. I don't have problems...

That's good to know. I don't think it's a problem with .NET's mail, but a change that got overlooked when we "enhanced" our mail sending so that implicit SSL could be supported for those requiring it. It's odd that it worked for you at home though... I'm thinking it will be something like adding a file extension to the path or the file path to the attachment is too long. I'll start looking into this and try to get more of an idea on what's going on so that I can add it to our bugs list without being too vague.

Dr. Liftig, what version of Open Dental are you at just so I have more information that might help me later?

[jsalmon]

So that worked here also, but Jason, please educate us- what changed here? It was working fine last week.

I wasn't part of the change, but it looks like new code was added so that if users are using the specific port 465 as their smtp server port then it uses "backward compatible" code if you will so that implicit SSL can be supported. The enhancement looks like it was supposed to not affect the way email used to be sent, but obviously something has slipped by and is affecting the way email used to be sent when not using port 465. I'll start trying to duplicate it, but yesterday it worked with gmail and godaddy. I didn't spend too much time on it though, hopefully my second path will shed more light.

[drtech]

when I changed it to gmail smtp, it works, but all ours starting timing out when using a 1and1 server smtp that we had used for years.

[brentwood]

Changing port number to 465 makes the problem go away. But 465 is not the port number on 1and1 (my ISP) email client setup guide. Port 587 is. I don't know what problems it may cause. Do you have any plan to go back to the original code, so I can use port 587? Thanks.

[jsalmon]

Finally figured it out. Open Dental is allowing 10 seconds to send e-mails otherwise it assumes the message failed to send. The new port 465 code does not have a timeout restriction which is why it worked as a temporary solution. I'll be talking this over with Jordan and will most likely be adding this to our bug tracker. I'm pretty frustrated that it took this long to figure out... but then again, I can't really get mad at my work and home computers for sending large emails so efficiently.

[jsalmon]

Bug: "Sending emails with large attachments would fail with a time out error sometimes." is fixed and will be released with v12.4.40 and v13.1.4.