Let’s explore more about the error, MSMTP the server sent an empty reply with this article. At Bobcares, with our Server Management Service, we can handle your server issues.

 The Server Sent An Empty Reply Error in MSMTP

MSMTP: A very simple and user-friendly SMTP client with decent Sendmail compatibility is MSMTP. By default, it reads a message from standard input and transmits it to a specified SMTP server, which is responsible for ensuring proper delivery. Sendmail is compatible with exit codes and command line arguments.

It has namely 3 modes, Sendmail mode, Server Information mode, and Remote Message Queue Starting mode.

Features MSMTP supports:

• TLS secured connections.
• Authentication methods PLAIN, LOGIN, CRAM-MD5 and EXTERNAL.
• Globalized Domain Names.
• Delivery Status update.
• PIPE-LINING support for increased transmission speed.
• Remote Message Queue Starting.

When the mail server does not support STARTTLS over port 587 but requires TLS over port 465, then we may encounter the error. In this article, we will see the steps to troubleshoot the error.

How To Fix MSMTP The Server Sent An Empty Reply Error?

The solution is so simple. All we have to do is to let msmtp use TLS over port 465 and add the following line to ~/.msmtprc:

tls_starttls off

It can also happen on Zoho SMTP servers when the mail has no blank line between mail headers and mail body (see Debian bug #917260). The solution to this is to add an extra space in between:

"test-header\n\ntest-body"

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Conclusion

In this article, our Support team went over MSMTP the ‘server sent an empty reply’ error details along with a simple method to fix it.