Yesterday’s Butt Kicking Continues

Yesterday’s morning R&D centered around trouble shooting an SMTP problem with a Windows2003 server and ASP. Basically, I don’t get the error on my development server, which is still a Windows2000 machine. That means it could be code or server setup. The problem manifests itself when an attempt is made to send an email after a form is submitted.

CDO.Message.1 error ‘80040220’

The “SendUsing” configuration value is invalid.

This error message is all over Google (see also) (remember to use Blingo – aff link!).

I solve this in the next 2 hours!

Update: Why does Google continue to index www.experts-exchange.com?! Never click anything that is a link to www.experts-exchange.com! They obviously understand SEO really well.

Update: Troubleshooting thus far.

• Contacted the web host and explained that I think the server is not configured correct since emailing through telnet seemed to fail (but I might have done something wrong). Tech support explained that although they host the website that another company hosts the email. Excuse me? And that has exactly what to do with sending an email from asp through localhost? Here’s another testing through telnet instructional.
• Wow! SMTPDiag is fantastic. I’ve used it before but sort of put it out of my mind until now. It returns "failed to connect to the domain controller Error: ‘8007054b"
• How to test outbound mail flow with a file in the Pickup folder
• Initially looked like ColdFusion could send from the domain that ASP could not then I realized someone has changed cfmail to use an external mail server. Wonder how I would do that with ASP.
• After reading "SendUsing" configuration value is invalid (80040220), and access privilege problems caused by Exchange 2000 SP3, and how to test the SMTP service, and Troubleshooting email, the telnet way, and Troubleshooting IIS SMTP, and Testing email using RFC-822 and the pickup folder, I finally returned to reading all the comments in CDOSYS or CDONTS, Which Will It Be? to discover an astute comment by Scott Forsyth that this is indeed a permissions error and fixed by searching google for metaacl.vbs to discover these two technotes: ACLs and using MetaACL for metabase ACL permission changes (for understanding) and The MetaAcl tool for modifying metabase permissions on the IIS Admin Objects is available (for the vbs packaged within a self-extracting archive)

Title: The “SendUsing” configuration value is invalid in Windows 2003
Name: Scott Forsyth
Date: 3/27/2006 10:10:04 AM
Comment:
Hi Monde,

On Windows Server 2003, if you don’t specify the default smtp server, it needs to obtain that from the IIS metabase. That isn’t allowed by default in IIS6, but you can add it with metaacl.vbs. Google and download a copy of metaacl.vbs and the run the following:

cscript metaacl.vbs “IIS://Localhost/smtpsvc” IIS_WPG RE
cscript metaacl.vbs “IIS://Localhost/smtpsvc/1” IIS_WPG RE

This will give the IIS_WPG group read permissions to the smtpsrv node so that you’ll be able to obtain the default SMTP server without specifically setting it in code. This will often resolve the error that you have run into.

[Source]

Now, all of that said, only hurdle one has been jumped. My error message of "The "SendUsing" configuration value is invalid." is gone but mail is getting stuck in //Inetpub/mailroot/Queue. At least it is not going to the Badmail folder. Brief break then onto hurdle two.