MT4 suddenly looses the ability to SMTP send email alerts

[Todd Gilbey]

Good evening, fellow MT4ites!

So up until last week (November 2020) my MT4 platform (Version 4.00 Build 1311) suddenly seized sending email alerts. My SMTP details are correct, including the port number (587). I used SendGrid and now I'm using Sendinblue to see if it was an issue with SendGrid, seeing SIB has the same result I wondered if MT4 have beefed up their SMTP requirements and I'm missing something major here.

The result in the Journal is as follows:

2020.12.05 23:55:42.479 Mail: 'Test message' failed

If my SMTP details were incorrect, I would be receiving the "smtp.sendgrid.net:587 failed" Journal message. This happens regardless as to whether my platform is running from on on-premises system or my VM in New York.

Has anyone else has this issue recently?

Happy Holidays to you all too, here's to a better year for for everyone next year! 

[pips4life]

I have MT4 (Version 4.00 build 1353, 16 Dec 2021).   Email alerts has been working fine on a Windows 10 machine, but I just got a new Windows 11 machine.

I installed just one MT4 normally, but for all the others, I just copied the MT4 folders from one computer to the other.  This works fine for me, because I run the terminal.exe with the "  /portable" option, using a Shortcut.   That way, my MQL4 folder, with all my code, is self-contained.  Apart from the "Common" folder, I don't mess around with the AppData locations.

On the new computer, I of course had to enter my account password, and the broker server again.  Then, I had to use Tools -> Options -> Email tab, and enter my info.

I'm using smtp.comcast.net:587 

I have a login and password for that.  I use the same login name as the "From:" email.  For the "To:", I use my [e-mail]  (Search Google for 'email Verizon text`, for example).

I usually get texts on my phone within a minute or so, but sometimes it's slower.   (Push Notifications is obviously another  -- perhaps better -- way to go, moving forward, but I have legacy tools that email alerts).

So on my new Win11 computer, the 'Test' email was always getting the "Mail: 'Test message' failed" in the Journal!  Sucked.

On my firewall, I momentarily disabled each of the blocks, did a test, and nothing worked.

On my ONLY directly installed MT4, it wasn't working either, but unfortunately, I did make a typo.  My "To:" address had ".com" instead of ".net", so no way was it going to work.  I didn't know that yet, but got back to it later and it worked!

Meanwhile, I installed a generic MT5 directly.  I again used the faulty "To:" address, so I thought I was stuck, but once I realized my typo (which was ONLY in the two directly installed MT4 and MT5; all my copied MT4's were correct, and *should* have worked!)

Once I fixed the "To:" address, then my installed MT4 worked; my installed MT5 worked; AND, all my copied MT4's started working to!

The only other variable for the day was that in Win11, I ran the "optionalfeatures" (no space) command.  I checked boxes to install the ".NET Framework 3.5 (includes .NET 2.0 and 3.0)", including the sub-boxes checked.  I did this to get some old CD-based software (Quicken 2013) working.  Fortunately it still works on Windows 11.    I have no idea that this would have affected MT4 at all -- and I seriously doubt it -- but for full disclosure, it's something I did.

Bottom line:  It was frustrating to get MT4 "Email" feature to work.  There are zero helpful error messages, AFAIK.  However, MT5 was more helpful because it did actually mention my "To:" address was bad, which I thought had been correct but turns out to be my typo!  So, thanks to slightly better MT5 error messages, I narrowed in on it.

I am also *speculating* that it might have been helpful to have installed MT5 directly.  Who knows if it opened up some channel that MT4 would then work.  OR, my newly installed MT4 had to first correctly send an email before all my other MT4 *copied* folders would work.  It was strange to debug it, but finally something worked and I got it running. 

Hope this helps.  YMMV. 

[pips4life]

A followup:   There's still something else that's strange going on.  Turns out I made several of the typos in my copied MT4 folders.  My "To:" had ".com" on several, which was wrong so of course these didn't work.  Those with ".net" did work.

However, if it was wrong, I was *not* always able to simply make the correction and do an instant successful test!  For a couple, I had to make the correction, then actually quit MT4 and restart it first, and upon restart, the settings were already correct.  Then a 'Test' seemed to work.

Again, it was strange, because I am getting 15 MT4 folders up and running.  There was a lot of repetitive steps, and sometime everything worked, even if I had to fix my typo.  But on at least two folders, simply correcting the Email fields was not enough!  I had to fix the fields, quit, restart, then it worked.

Perhaps there was some memory caching of the form -- with the wrong settings -- going on behind the scenes.  I could not nail down definitive bad behavior.

Then there is also the possibility that my email provider was balking at receiving too many email requests within a short time.  But quitting and restarting was fairly fast, so it doesn't seem likely that was an issue.