CiviMail recipient count stuck on Estimating

Question

I'm unable to send and/or produce test emails for large mailings. This seems to be a result of CiviMail not completing the recipient estimation process. Attempting a test email while it's stuck on "estimating" gives this error:

Error in call to Mailing_send_test : Error in call to MailingJob_create : DB Constraint Violation - possibly mailing_id should possibly be marked as mandatory for this API. If so, please raise a bug report

This appears to happen in the neighborhood of 4500 recipients and above.

[I have seen reports that similar issues were resolved in version 4.6.3, but this error occurred in 4.6.9]

Answer 1

I looked into this for Eric. The backtrace for the error was

sites/all/modules/civicrm/packages/DB/mysql.php(895): DB_common->raiseError(-1, NULL, NULL, NULL, "1114 ** The table 'I_1884' is full"

The mailing job is trying to create a temporary table of all the email addresses, but it can't. This is a result of the max_heap_table_size being set to low in the mysql config file. The default is 16 mb.

Answer 2

I was able to 'fix' the issue by simply deleting all the groups (I didn't have any previous mailings in here) from the Recipients field and then re-adding them. Make no other edits before the estimated number of recipients finishes, and the draft is saved. I was able to send a test email successfully after that. The mailing list this happened with to me is ~585 contacts.

NOTE: I just had this error pop up and found this Stack Exchange question from a Google search of the error message.