Last week we deployed a background script for a client which was used intermitently to batch send a couple of hundred emails. We were using SwiftMailer but weren’t able to use the “Spool” strategy to send because the messages contained Unicode characters which was breaking the serialization. Anyway, we ended up with code that looked something like the following:
Nothing to crazy going on. We were also sending the emails through Amazon SES which is why we introduced the sleep(..) to keep ourselves below the sending limits.
Things seemed like they were fine but then we’d seemingly randomly get the following exception:
PHP Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Swift_TransportException' with message 'Expected response code 250 but got code "421", with message "421 Timeout waiting for data from client.
"' in /usr/share/php/symfony/vendor/swiftmailer/classes/Swift/Transport/AbstractSmtpTransport.php:406
Stack trace:
#0 /usr/share/php/symfony/vendor/swiftmailer/classes/Swift/Transport/AbstractSmtpTransport.php(290): Swift_Transport_AbstractSmtpTransport->_assertResponseCode('421 Timeout wai...',$
#1 /usr/share/php/symfony/vendor/swiftmailer/classes/Swift/Transport/EsmtpTransport.php(197): Swift_Transport_AbstractSmtpTransport->executeCommand('MAIL FROM: <adm...', Array, Arra$
#2 /usr/share/php/symfony/vendor/swiftmailer/classes/Swift/Transport/EsmtpTransport.php(267): Swift_Transport_EsmtpTransport->executeCommand('MAIL FROM: <adm...', Array)
#3 /usr/share/php/symfony/vendor/swiftmailer/classes/Swift/Transport/AbstractSmtpTransport.php(441): Swift_Transport_EsmtpTransport->_doMailFromCommand('admin@chatthrea...')
#4 /usr/share/php/symfony/ve in /usr/share/php/symfony/vendor/swiftmailer/classes/Swift/Transport/AbstractSmtpTransport.php on line 406
After doing some digging around, it turns out Amazon’s SES service has a connection timeout which SwiftMailer was tripping up on. I couldn’t actually find an official published timeout limit but looking at the SwiftMailer code it seemed like it was possible to set a timeout inside Swift. We added a “timeout: 5” setting to our Symfony factories.yml file inside the SwiftMailer settings and it seemed to fix our issues.