Send gmail with Send SMTP mail Message not working

[Lakshay_Verma]

I don’t know what was the reason behind this issue, i checked logs, event logs from windows, used fiddler to track network but unfortunately nothing that i can use to debug this issue.
However, one thing i have noticed is, out of 8 time in 10, downgrading mail package and restarting machine afterwards work. It worked for me before, if worked for me yesterday.

[siming]

Thank you for the insight! I, however, have to take an alternative route to use Google API to send gmail instead of SMTP for the client, because they are no longer happy with not finding out what issue is with SMTP. Anyways, if i were to run into this again, which i hope is never, i will for sure try to downgrade the package and reinstall.
Thank you!

[roy_r]

Hey All,

I have this issue also - this is only the third time in a year. The 2nd time it happened I thought I had resolved the issue by simply restarting my machine and reconnecting to the VPN. However it’s just happened now and went through the steps I tried last time but it still doesn’t work.
Interestingly sending emails via the Send Exchange activity does work so it looks like it’s something to do with the SMTP activity. I’m on the enterprise version of Studio also. I know that if I run my automation on another machine it will work. I’m about to try and uninstall and re-install the mail package. One thing to note is that before I had the problem this time, my send mail activity failed because I specified an attachment which didn’t exist at the time (which casued the automation to fault) so wondering if that has caused a lock of some sort.

[siming]

Me too, after switching to Gmail activity, I haven’t had any issue so far. I am on community version and send SMTP mail did not fail before I run into this issue, so i guess the problem isn’t caused by a failed process, or the version of studio. I am also running the process on a local machine with no vpn connection, so i guess that did not cause the issue either.
Anyways, thank you for the input, please let me know if reintalling mail package works for you.

[roy_r]

UPDATE.
SO I switched the computer off yesterday and switched in on today (normally it’s in sleep mode).
And now it’s working normally.

My theory is that the smtp request failed and something is stuck on the smtp server. So when you try to send another one MAYBE UiPath is waiting for a reply but never gets one.

Waiting for a day must cause some sort of timeout at the server end and everything resets.

I could be talking out of my backside here.

It’s just worrying that the UiPath Send SMTP activity doesn’t ever timeout as you would expect. If it did you could cater for the scenario.

I remember reading some clever dude got around it by placing the send smtp request inside a parallel activity and checked for the state that way.

Anyway I could try and re-create the smtp failure by supplying it with a non-existent attachment, hoping it then hangs after a second retry and then turning my machine of for a certain length of time or waiting - but have to wait until the weekend as I need to get a project done and can’t afford for this function to not work at the moment.

[roy_r]

OK so I’ve spent a fair amount of time on this now and the only conclusions I can come up with is that rebooting my machine seems to sort out the issue.

However.

I think what’s causing it maybe something to do with the attachment - maybe even the size of it.

Basically what I’m doing is sending myself or anyone on a distribution list a screenshot of any UiPath failures during execution.

Coinicidentally I’m working off two screens at the moment when noticing this issue, (I normally work just off my laptop) so I’m guessing the screenshot is twice the size. Over 200KB.

Since I’ve removed the screenshot attachment (held on a network drive) from the SMTP activity the emails have started going through (After a reboot - Once it fails it seems to stay stuck until I reboot).

I’m now pasting a link to the screenshot.

I’ll update if this turns out to revert to failing again with this new method.