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How can I suppress email sending errors until all other emails in Outbox are sent?

  • 7 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 3 views
  • Last reply by Wayne Mery

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I semi-regularly use Thunderbird for sending individualized emails using the "Mail Merge" add-on. The email address are supplied by the recipients and often contains errors. By default, when sending the emails, if there is an incorrect email address, a "An error occurred while sending mail. blah blah blah..." alert pops up and Thunderbird would not continue sending the remaining emails in the Outbox until I click "OK". This is annoying as I have to sit in front of my computer just to wait for the error message to show up and click "OK".

Is there a way to: (1) suppress the alerts altogether, (2) let the alerts to show up only after all emails are sent, or (3) send the error messages to my inbox and not show them as alerts?

An example of the error message alerts is attached.

I semi-regularly use Thunderbird for sending individualized emails using the "Mail Merge" add-on. The email address are supplied by the recipients and often contains errors. By default, when sending the emails, if there is an incorrect email address, a "An error occurred while sending mail. blah blah blah..." alert pops up and Thunderbird would not continue sending the remaining emails in the Outbox until I click "OK". This is annoying as I have to sit in front of my computer just to wait for the error message to show up and click "OK". Is there a way to: (1) suppress the alerts altogether, (2) let the alerts to show up only after all emails are sent, or (3) send the error messages to my inbox and not show them as alerts? An example of the error message alerts is attached.
Attached screenshots

All Replies (7)

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I suggest you try the method of sending in background, by double-clicking the preference mailnews.sendInBackground to true in Tools/Options/Advanced/General/Config. editor.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_3.0_-_New_Features_and_Changes#Send_in_Background

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sfhowes said

I suggest you try the method of sending in background, by double-clicking the preference mailnews.sendInBackground to true in Tools/Options/Advanced/General/Config. editor. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_3.0_-_New_Features_and_Changes#Send_in_Background

Thanks for the suggestion but it doesn't seem to work.

I have set "mailnews.sendInBackground" to false, and also set "set mailnews.show_send_progress" to false as suggested by the knowledge base article, and restarted Thunderbird. Sending errors still block other unsent emails in Outbox.

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Note that the article says to set mailnews.sendInBackground to true, not false.

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Oops I meant "true". I have set "mailnews.sendInBackground" to true, and "mailnews.show_send_progress" to false.

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Never mind. I've read here that the functionality I want is not yet implemented: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/TestPlans/SendInBackground

I suppose I will just have to wait.

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using send in background basically ignores errors. I do not recommend it for anything serious.

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That is correct - bypassing the errors is not fixed