Problems sending emails from PingPlotter’s file menu

Question

I'm trying to send an email via the PingPlotter File -> Send Email option, but I'm getting errors. (General MAPI failure, MAPI Error, etc).

Solution

There are two likely possible problems that would cause MAPI-related errors.

• You just installed PingPlotter and ran it from the 'Launch PingPlotter Now' option on installer.

  If you just installed PingPlotter, and launched from the installer, then there might be an install-related permissions problem. Just close and restart PingPlotter to solve this problem (it won't reoccur when you launch from normal Shortcuts). If you already have data collected and you want to send it, then look at the end of this article on how to manually create the email.

• You don't have a MAPI client installed.

  PingPlotter uses Windows Simple MAPI to send emails. Normally, when you're trying to send an email like this (with data or an image attached), you need to add additional text / explanation to the email, so opening the email in your email client is a great way to 'finish off' this email.

  If you don't have an email client installed on your machine, this menu option won't work, though. This might happen if you're using a web email client like Gmail or Yahoo Mail.

Errors like this don't mean you can't send an email, it just means you'll need to create the email manually. You'll need to save off the image (File -> Save Image...) and/or .pp2 data file (File -> Save Sample Set...), and then manually attach these files using your webmail client.

If you often send these emails, most webmail systems will also allow you to use an email client (like the free email client Thunderbird), so you can install an email client (one that supports simple MAPI, which is most of them) and configure it to send emails through your mail provider. In most cases, though, it's easier to just save the files off and manually attach them rather than to install an email client just for this purpose.