HOW TO FIX SMTP ERROR: DATA NOT ACCEPTED FROM PHPMAILER ON ZOHOMAIL

On our Social Wall Development server, I was getting this error message when sending out email subscription notifications:

SMTP Error: Data not Accepted

For those of you who are not familiar with Social Wall, it is an Advertise Me SaaS tool that aggregates your social media posts and displays them on a digital wall.

The reason why I was testing this, was because we were introducing a new email workflow to send out our custom branding emails. I use to do this manually by using templates in Gmail, however, I decided it was better to send these out 2 days after the account is activated and have this automated. The email introduces the custom branding package which will allow further customisation on the Social Wall. Here’s the Custom Branding email:

Our software developer managed to build this feature however when we tried testing the feature on the development server it didn’t work. One way to troubleshoot the issue is to perform some debugging and the following code is what I used in the PHP file to help me figure out what the problem was:

$mail->SMTPDebug = true;

This enabled the SMTP debugging log and displayed the full log information.

As per the log, you will see that the authentication was successful, so there wasn’t any problem with the username and password. Now, just before the SMTP Error: Data not accepted the message, the cause of the problem was clear. We use Zoho as our email provider and it was blocking the outgoing emails all we needed to do is go to https://mail.zoho.com/UnblockMe to unblock the ability to send outgoing emails. Just login using the account details and then follow the prompts. Once it’s successfully unblocked, you will see the message There are no block for the account.

I hope this helps and if it does, please share this article and subscribe to my newsletter to receive more useful tips!

If this article helped you in any way and you want to show your appreciation, I am more than happy to receive donations through PayPal. This will help me maintain and improve this website so I can help more people out there. Thank you for your help.

Marco Tran

I am an entrepreneur based in Sydney Australia. I was born in Vietnam, grew up in Italy and currently residing in Australia. I started my first business venture Advertise Me from a random idea and have never looked back since. My passion is in the digital space, affiliate marketing, fitness and I launched several digital products. You will find these on the portfolio page.

I’ve decided to change from a Vegetarian to a Vegan diet and started a website called Veggie Meals.

I started this blog so I could leave a digital footprint of my random thoughts, ideas and life in general.

If any of the articles helped you in any way, please donate. Thank you for your help.

Affiliate Compensated: there are some articles with links to products or services that I may receive a commission.