How To Troubleshoot Commerce Server Direct Mailer

This step-by-step article describes how to troubleshoot Direct Mailer.

Direct Mailer functionality is a high-performance personalized mail generation engine. You can use List Manager to import and manage mailing lists. Direct Mailer uses the mailing list that you create by using List Manager to send mail to the recipients in the list.

Configuration Properties

If you are experiencing problems when you use Direct Mailer, follow these steps to verify the Direct Mail Configuration properties:

1. Expand Commerce Server Manager, open the Commerce Group that you want to administer, and then click Global Resources.
2. Right-click Direct Mailer, and then click Properties.
3. Verify the following settings:
   • Delivery Locations - Drop directories are listed for local delivery, and the SMTP server address is listed for remote delivery. See the Delivery Method property to determine if it is set for local delivery or remote delivery.
   • Delivery Method - Determines where the mailings are to be delivered.
     • If Delivery Method is set to Local, and Direct Mailer is processing the job as expected, the messages that Direct Mailer creates appear in the delivery location (or locations) that you specified in the Delivery Locations property.
     • If Delivery Method is set to Remote, and Direct Mailer is processing the job as expected, the messages go through the pickup folder, System Drive\Inetpub\Mailroot\Queue. This occurs very quickly; you might not see the message go through the pickup folder.
     • If the messages do not appear in the drop folder or the SMTP queue folder, get the failing job ID, and then get more information about the failure in the dml_job_errors table in the Direct Mail database. See the product documentation for complete instructions about how to do this.
   • Log Folder Path - Direct Mailer log. This log is not very informative for troubleshooting. However, it logs previous successes and failures, and logs the failing job ID, which you can get here if you cannot get it from the event log.
   • Maximum Error Percentage - See the product documentation.
   • Maximum Thread Count - Default equal to the number of processors in the server. If you are using a dedicated server, you can increase the thread count to decrease the processing time for the Direct Mailer job. Visit the Microsoft Web site that appears in the "References" section for information about how to identify the correct value.
     
     If you increase the thread count too much, SMTP overflows. This value is dependent on the hardware and the environment configuration. Double the default installed value, and then test the mailer again.
   • Message Per Hour - Default is 0. You can change this value to stop SMTP from overflowing. However, you can also use the Maximum Thread Count property to prevent this problem.
   • Performance Update Interval - See the product documentation.
   • Pipeline Configuration File - Default System Drive\Microsoft Commerce Server\DMLPipe.pcf. If you have changed this file, review your changes to verify that they are what you want.
   • Proxy Bypass - See the product documentation.
   • Proxy Server - See the product documentation.
   • Connection Strings - See the product documentation. Open the Bizdesk, click Campaigns, and then click Campaign Manager. If you receive the following error message
     Direct Mail global resource is not available
     change the connection string accordingly.

Common Errors in the dml_jobs_errors Table

• job_error_code -2147220977
  job_error_str CDO error while trying to compose or send a message to recipient ....
  The server response was: 550 ....unable to relay for .....
  Suggested solution: Add the Commerce Server IP address to the SMTP Relay.
• job_error_code -2147220973
  job_error_str CDO error while trying to compose or send a message to recipient ....The transport failed to connect to the server.
  Suggested solution: The SMTP server is not available. Verify that the SMTP server can send e-mail messages. See the articles listed in the "References" section.
• job_error_code -2147220975
  job_error_str CDO error while trying to compose or send a message. Message could not be sent to the SMTP server.
  The transport error code was 0x800CCC13. The server response was not available.
  Suggested solution: Direct Mail Engineer might be causing the SMTP server to backup. If possible, test by using drop directories instead of remote SMTP server. If this is not possible, review the SMTP server settings to verify that you open up SMTP as much as possible for testing.

Important Considerations

• Commerce Server 2000 is not cluster-aware.
• Commerce Server 2000 - Direct Mailer must be installed on the computer running SQL Server.
• Commerce Server 2002 is cluster-aware. For more information, see the product documentation. To do this, open the Commerce Server 2002 documentation, view the article titled "Deploying your Site," click Configuring a Typical Deployment," click Configuring the Database Tier, and then click Installing Commerce Server 2002 Resource as a Clustered Resource.

For additional information about testing SMTP, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: