Visual Studio Journey: The "SendUsing" configuration value is invalid.

Saturday, April 13, 2013

The "SendUsing" configuration value is invalid.

I am moving a asp classic app from Windows SBS 2003 IIS 7 to Windows Server 2012 IIS 8.
After spending all day figuring out a dozen different things, the site finds itself unable to send emails. So I constructed a simple email sender to test it out.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title> Email Test </title>
</head>

<body>
<%
    Set myMail=CreateObject("CDO.Message")
    myMail.Subject="Sending email with CDO"
    myMail.From="doNotReply@myserver.com"
    myMail.To="myemail@gmail.com"
    myMail.TextBody="This is a message."
    myMail.Send
    set myMail=nothing
%>

The message has been sent.
</body>
</html>

That's literally the whole thing. it gives...

CDO.Message.1 error '80040220'
The "SendUsing" configuration value is invalid.
/cgi-bin/testemail.asp, line 14

So I googled. First I changed the app pool user from ApplicationPoolIdentity to NetworkService, as many bloggers suggest.

No change.

Then I found some code that looks like this:

schema = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/"
  Set objFlds = objConf.Fields
  with objFlds
    .Item(schema & "sendusing") = 2
    .Item(schema & "smtpserver") = "smtp.gmail.com"
    .Item(schema & "smtpserverport") = 465
    .Item(schema & "smtpauthenticate") = 1
    .Item(schema & "sendusername") = "abc@def.com"
    .Item(schema & "sendpassword") = "qwerty"
    .Item(schema & "smtpusessl") = 1
    .Update
  End with

and... no such luck. Same Error.

...

Bryan Valencia is a contributing editor and founder of Visual Studio Journey. He owns and operates Software Services, a web design and hosting company in Manteca, California.