Errors when sending email / Quick campaign email from CRM

This issue I have solved many times but when a known answer does not work you tend to look on other options.

Problem: Client reported that error occurs when trying to send emails from MS CRM. My first thought check the Outgoing Emails configuration on the CRM server. It looks correct, but when troubleshooting different options saw that SSL is enabled and actually exchange (used as SMTP) is not enabled with certificate or SSL.

Error Messages: “An error has occured. Contact your system administrator” OR “Invalid Visibility Modification Access” and “Invalid Association: The request associtaion is not valid”

Microsoft KB Articles: Few KB articles which helped me ensure Exchange and CRM settings are correct 

http://blogs.infinite-x.net/2007/08/10/errors-when-sending-email-from-crm/ Great Blog from Mitch Milam !!  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/916925                                                                            http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939402

All the above articles helped me checked what’s wrong. But resolution was the known old KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/906471

Resolution: Then I have to reconfigure the Outgoing emails registry settings as per the KB article  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/906471 which explains how to change incoming and outgoing settings when CRM is already installed. While going through the article I felt that there should be an easier way to configure these settings. After searching a while I got CRM SMTP SETTINGS utility developed by www.crmaccelerators.com, which provides a GUI mode to configure SMTP settings.  Very easy to configure settings.

Once settings were done outgoing emails from CRM disn’t show any errors. Make sure you use the correct authentication method. I struggled for sometime in this bit.

Hope this solves your outgoing email problems.

Piyush