egerrits said:

This day and age, Simply still can't save an Invoice as PDF

Yeah, it's kind of ridiculous to have to go through the extra steps of emailing oneself the invoice, or using a PDF writer.  Windows 10 came with a PDF writer, so I use that.

egerrits said:

or needs Outlook (from six+ years ago) to email an invoice? And even then, it's a 50-50 chance it might work?

Please post what email system you're trying to use, and I'll try to help you.  

I've been able to email an invoice from every version of Outlook and from Thunderbird, as long as it's the (Microsoft recommended) 32 bit email software.  

egerrits said:

Not everyone likes Outlook, or using an eight year old version, and you can't have another email program installed that you'd rather use, since it might pose a conflict.

Sage, please get into the 90s, where every program could email on its own.

Takes about 10 minutes to implement. It's built into Windows for pete's sake. All you need is your smtp server, username & password, and you can send an email. Without any other program.

Due to email worms, many ISPs and server operators routinely block the standard SMTP ports, so you have to fuss around with various alternative TCP/IP ports.  This is why Sage has announced that they're putting together connectors for most popular webmail systems.    I've never heard of an ISP blocking the HTTP ports.   I wrote that before the release date, my mistake, you DO have to fuss with TCP/IP ports, because the 2016.3 email functionality IS SMTP.

I hope that helps, please post back.

P.S.  I don't work for Sage, haven't seen a need to renew the Certified whatever consultant membership that they used to bill me for.

I have one computer, windows 8, sage 50 2016.2 & Mailbird, and emailing works like a charm. Then I have another system: Windows 10 ("Sage 50 is now Windows 10 compatible!") with Sage 50 2016.2, and I have tried a variety of email programs: mailbird, postbox, thunderbird & outlook 2007 (32 bit). When I install a brand new email program, make it the default, it works THAT DAY. Come in the next day, and I get MAPI errors (or Simply just hangs when emailing). Then uninstall Mailbird, install Outlook 2007. Works. For one day. Next day, same thing. I only have one email program installed at any one time, I do not understand why it works for one day and then stops.

Thanks for your help

egerrits said:

I do not understand why it works for one day and then stops.

I think that you may be installing one software before Windows finishes cleaning up the last one.   As part of the cleanup it may remove bits and pieces that other software needs, or change registry keys to what they were before some install in the past.  Or if Sage 50 is running during the installation, the MAPI DLL stays loaded, and can work for the rest of the day until Sage 50 (or the whole workstation) is shut down and re-started.  

I would:

Try uninstalling all email clients, restart twice with a few minutes pause in between for installation to finish.

Then install the email system of choice, and again restart twice.

If the email system doesn't work, check for this registry key:

In HKeyLocalMachine\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows Messaging Subsystem, there should be a key 'MAPI' with a value of '1'.

Sage 50 checks key this when starting up, and if it's found, it will attempt to load the MAPI dll (you should see it in Help | About | Support Info).  

If the key isn't there when Sage 50 starts, it won't try to load it (but there is no error message displayed until you click 'send', so that's when most of use find out that it didn't work.  In my opinion, the error message should be 'MAPI did not load' rather than 'MAPI not installed'.).

Or paste this into a batch file or command window, and run it:

REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows Messaging Subsystem" -v MAPI -t REG_SZ -d 1

Uninstalled all mail apps. Restarted twice. Simply started up without loading MAPI32.dll. So far so good. Installed/Uninstalled a number of mail clients (Postbox, Outlook 2007, Mailbird), non worked, and finally settled on Thunderbird. It seems to be working now. I have restarted a couple of times, and continues to work TODAY. Let's see what happens on Monday.

Thanks for your help

Either Outlook 2007 or Thunderbird should have worked.

So... how are you now?

It's halfway through Monday and Thunderbird is still working! Office 2007 did NOT work. Got a MAPI error every time I tried it, cleanly installed and verified the MAPI=7 registry setting. Thunderbird worked from the get-go.

* MAPI=1 that should say

And hey, on Thursday, it just stops working =P Click email Invoice, and Thunderbird pops to the foreground (new) and does nothing. No error, no sending.

So frustrating!

So, that said, have there been other changes? 

If my car had a dead battery, then after replacement it started and ran properly 5 days in a row, then one day it wouldn't move, I would not spend much time troubleshooting the battery.   

Sage 50 seems to be communicating with the MAPI subsystem, but when that subsystem passes the data to the Email client, something didn't work.   I can't tell you more than that, from here.  

Start with the basics:

 - Reboot, delete temp files, reboot again. 

 - Check the email template.   Try to print, using the exact template you are using to email with.   Try to email, using the one that's working for print.

 - Don't rule out hardware problems.   An intermittently flaky hard drive / system board / RAM

 - Suspect your antimalware software.   Disconnect the network cable, shut it off / remove it (but keep the installation file!), restart, try again.

And finally,

 - Most people are not having any problems with MAPI email from Sage 50.  For nearly everyone, it Just Works.

 - Keep in mind that computers are cheap, compared to time.  It was the other way 'round when I first had my hands on a $6,000 Compaq XT.  That's about $16,000 in today's dollars, about the same as a reasonably cheap new car.  

 - Just because you're way down the rabbit hole with this one workstation is no reason to keep going.  A refurbished i3 Windows 7 workstation goes for less than $200 in Calgary.  

We have addressed this issue in Sage 50 2016.3 which released this week.

Thanks,
Alistair Ellis
Senior Product Manager, Sage 50

Thanks Alistair! I am looking forward to trying it out! =)

I would just like to say: thank you!

I now have a choice: default email program or enter smtp details, and it works like a charm!

Happy again...

What do you mean you addressed it? Using Windows Live Mail 2012 hosted version, so the client is sitting on my computer. Was working like a charm using version 2016.2, install 2016.3 and boom! Get a generic error. Send a note to Sage City and NO RESPONSE FROM SAGE! Log onto the chat network and get a person who informs me it is a KNOWN ISSUE and the developers are working on it, but could afford no time when it might resolved. Told me to open a WEBMAIL account... Are you friggin' crazy. I work hard to maintain brand and I AM NOT SENDING OUT INVOICES OVER [email protected]

Post a note somewhere explaining there is an issue, so we don't have to waste our time tracking down a faulty buggy program that you know about!

Well... in their defence, programming is really, really hard. 

And in defence of the support person, you said that you have a Windows Live Mail account, which is all you need to send using the SMTP capability that was added to the 2016.3 release.    

If you have access to an SMTP server (and you should, in Live Mail), you could use the SMTP settings described in this link 

https://www.smtp2go.com/docs/windowslivemail/

 (ignore the POP or IMAP settings, Sage 50 doesn't receive email) 

I hope that helps, Sage City is primarily a user support forum, moderated by Sage, and I'm not one of the Sage people.

Randy

Hello Randy and thanks for your reply... Don' take this personally, but I know programming is really, really difficult. So is earning the $700 I send SAGE annually to maintain my accounting software. But what is even more frustrating is having a perfectly good operating version 2016.2 and then have to do a forced update to get necessary tax tables and have the functionality of the program go out the window (as well as our interoffice workflow). As far as set up to windowslive mail we are and were set up for 2016.2 as your link indicates.

And then have an online tech advisor go on and on trying to deflect the problem with our email client (which is absurd given the fact the only change has been the reinstall of the update to Sage 50), and it functioned perfectly prior to the update, and then find the problem (identified as 76795 in the knowledgebase) which means instead of just indicating at the out set there was a known problem and further offering a date it would be rectified, instead of wasting my time having me answer technical questions on my set up would have been more professional.

I am not a programmer, I am a small business person who bought SAGE software because of the promise of functionality, ease and performance.

Again, don't mean to bite your head off, but in my opinion this is not defendable.

Jeff

Hi Jeff,

rogerson said:

So is earning the $700 I send SAGE annually to maintain my accounting software.

First off, I don't work for Sage, never have, almost certainly I never will 'cause I speak my mind, and they don't seem the sort of organization that reacts well to that. 

rogerson said:

Don' take this personally, but I know programming is really, really difficult.

I was being what my mother used to call facetious.  But only partly.   It's almost unimaginably hard - it's like explaining something intricate and complicated to the stupidest person you've ever encountered. 

rogerson said:

then have to do a forced update to get necessary tax tables and have the functionality of the program go out the window

If I was responsible for Sage software development, I would pretty much demand that the tax calculations and form printing get completely separated from the rest of the software.   Orderly, staged feature rollouts and required, last minute tax changes are very opposite things. 

rogerson said:

trying to deflect the problem with our email client

The root cause of this bug, is "sometimes Microsoft Office doesn't install correctly", and after that it doesn't work in accordance with the published specification.  It's not the Sage programmer's fault.  And while it would be great if each change could be regression tested on every possible workstation configuration to make sure that something unwanted hasn't changed... the resources to do that do not exist, on Earth.  So Sage added a feature, and in the process inadvertently nudged something so that it now works slightly differently, but still exactly to spec, and now the outlook part no longer works to Microsoft's spec.

rogerson said:

instead of just indicating at the out set there was a known problem and further offering a date it would be rectified, instead of wasting my time having me answer technical questions on my set up

I would guess that, Sage being a large corporation, they have professionals to install Microsoft Office properly, on test workstations that are probably all configured pretty much the same, with pretty much the same hardware.   They haven't seen this problem and couldn't have seen it, and couldn't even have foreseen it.  If they had, you would not have.  They're collecting data, trying to work out why it doesn't work on your computer.   You've posted about this problem in multiple threads, but no-one else has.   Probably you don't have the only computer in Canada that's broken in this specific way, but there probably aren't thousands of them either.

rogerson said:

but in my opinion this is not defendable.

So I get that it's unfair and I'm not unsympathetic.  But last week I pulled a small fries out of the bag at home after I paid for a large.  And sat down to watch Corner Gas only to find a half hour chunk of SportsCentre.   Bad stuff happens, my advice to you is to work the problem in front of you.  As I understand it, your options are:

Set up SMTP to send emails with attachments from Sage 50

Remove, restart, clean, and install Office 2013 or 2016 32 bit. 

Set up Thunderbird.

Getting an immediate patch or a procedure to fix Outlook is not one of your options today.   It may be an option in a few days, or it may be a few years.

(edit) almost no sooner said, than done!.

And you can't offend me, I used to do phone support for CanTax.  Before there was email and internet forums, and before Windows would run all day without a crash - and I wasn't free to speak my mind.

Alistair,

I don't want to poo-poo this new feature, because I love it, but is there a reason the smtp password is not saved and has to be reentered every day?

The accounting staff doesn't really have access (and shouldn't) to the email system passwords.

Just wondering if there's a reason for it, or just an oversight.

Thanks for putting this in.

Hey Randy, Thanks for your reply, and I really do appreciate your comments and I think we are coming from the same place (but I am still going to be long winded here).

I have never used OUTLOOK in Office, hated the integration, use to love OUTLOOK EXPRESS that was a component of Windows XP, when Windows 7 came along, and OUTLOOK EXPRESS ended, sought out a simple windows replacement and built a love hate relationship with the client version of WINDOWS LIVE MAIL and lived through the impossible integration of it with Simply ... yes a year or two of MAPI problems galore.

Windows Live is updated and consequently the MAPI issue disappears and finally Sage 50 is talking to the email client the way it use to when OUTLOOK EXPRESS was alive. EUREKA! Sure there were glitches, in that you had to make sure the email details were in the WINDOWS LIVE address book, but keeping that in mind and building a workflow that included ensuring or adding the email to the contact list first made it doable.... so for the last what, twelve months there has been a reasonable workflow....

Then 2016.3 is released and we are back to worse than where we were a year ago.

I appreciate that there are so many email clients out there, but that is not my problem. It is Sage's problem and if a version is working with a client prior to the upgrade they should ensure the code is in place to maintain that relationship after the update. I am not over simplifying this, I am stating a fact.

I am also neither a programmer nor an accounting guru! I bought their software in good faith that it would provide me with a simple and reliable solution to my accounting and payroll needs. And it did, up to about three days ago when the update that I was forced to install in it's entirety caused a huge disruption to my workflow. (do you know how many more steps it takes to print an invoice to a pdf file, then open the pdf and mail, versus auto create and mail the same pdf ... okay not a great amount for one or two invoices, but multiply that by 100 a day... who pays for this extra time to complete a simple task? Not Sage)..... It would be great as you mention if you could just download the necessary tax tables and not roll the dice with a full update.

And I know you don't work for Sage, if you did, you would have provided me a thirteen word canned response....

Jeff

programming is easy if you control the environment, because you control programming and testing (this is the hard part)
the problem is system integration where you need Sage and Microsoft and other software to play nice all the time
business people don't have time to integrate working solutions

that why Sage should build a SMTP client within Sage, so I provide the email account to use, Sage plugs in that provider's published SMTP parameters, and email works

Sage should also have a beta-testing program to try to work out these issues before publishing the update to everyone

Hey,

It did go thru discussion actually. Do we save the password allowing anyone to email thru the user's email box? Is it meant to be a shared email box? Do we look at adding ability to use different email addresses for different users?

My primary focus was to get Sage 50 working with web based email clients. The current way works for most of our customers who only have one person in the product. If a shared email address has been set up ([email protected]), then typically that password is shared with employees who have access to that email address.

I would recommend submitting an idea in IdeaScale and have others help determine the priority for saving the password by upvoting the idea.

Thank you,
Alistair

Thanks Alistair. Thanks for implementing it. It is already 1000% better than the not-always-working version before! I can put up with having to type a password every day vs. accounting complaining "We can't email invoices again!" =)

Hey everyone,

For those of our customers who may be having issues using Sage 50 2016.3 with Outlook, we have identified the issue and will be sending out a hot fix shortly, either today or tomorrow. This is not required for everyone. The issue only affects our customers who have a space in their Windows user name.

Thank you,
Alistair Ellis

We now have a Hot Fix available for the issue with emailing using Outlook or other Mapi email programs through Sage 50 Accounting. The updated file is available through our support team and is also posted in the Sage 50 knowledgebase:
 
 https://support.na.sage.com/selfservice/viewdocument.do?externalID=76977

 
Harjot Aujla
Sage 50 Canada - Product Specialist

Harjot your link does not go to the article. Please provide a link that works, or the KB article number. Thank you

Here is the working link for the Hot Fix
 
https://support.na.sage.com/selfservice/viewdocument.do?externalID=76977

KB ID 76977