Mandrill ValidationError

Question

Very excited to be asking my first question on StackOverflow. I've been relying on it to teach myself quite a lot over the years!

My question is this. I am getting the following error when trying to send a mail through Mandrill's API:

{"status":"error","code":-1,"name":"ValidationError","message":"You must specify a key value"}

The code that follows is what I am using to try to send the mail:

<?php
$to = 'their@email.com';
$content = '<p>this is the emails html <a href="www.google.co.uk">content</a></p>';
$subject = 'this is the subject';
$from = 'my@email.com';

$uri = 'https://mandrillapp.com/api/1.0/messages/send.json';
$content_text = strip_tags($content);

$postString = '{
"key": "RR_3yTMxxxxxxxx_Pa7gQ",
"message": { 
 "html": "' . $content . '",
 "text": "' . $content_text . '",
 "subject": "' . $subject . '",
 "from_email": "' . $from . '",
 "from_name": "' . $from . '",
 "to": [
 {
 "email": "' . $to . '",
 "name": "' . $to . '"
 }
 ],
 "track_opens": true,
 "track_clicks": true,
 "auto_text": true,
 "url_strip_qs": true,
 "preserve_recipients": true
},
"async": false
}';

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $uri);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postString);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
echo $result;

?>

What could be causing the validation error in the message. I am providing my API key, AND it's valid!

Hope someone will be able to help, and thanks for generally being AWESOME here!

Thanks!

Thanks for asking this question! I spent my whole night looking for the answer. — Ankit, Dec 06 '15 at 00:43

score 16 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 17 '13 at 13:55

You may also want to just use arrays, and let PHP handle the JSON encoding for you. This particular error is common if the JSON is invalid for some reason. So, for example, you could set your parameters like this:

$params = array(
    "key" => "keyhere",
    "message" => array(
        "html" => $content,
        "text" => $content_text,
        "to" => array(
            array("name" => $to, "email" => $to)
        ),
        "from_email" => $from,
        "from_name" => $from,
        "subject" => $subject,
        "track_opens" => true,
        "track_clicks" => true
    ),
    "async" => false
);

$postString = json_encode($params);

You can also use json_decode to parse the response if needed.

Thanks! It worked. But why?? I mean what was going wrong with just JSON. I am confused right now. Please answer. — Ankit, Dec 06 '15 at 00:45

score 12 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 01 '13 at 00:14

Bansi's answer worked for Dan B, but if someone else is having the same issue is good to check if the content have special characters (accents,umlauts,cedillas,apostrophes,etc). If that's the case the solution could be to utf8 encode the text:

$content = utf8_encode('<p>Greetings from Bogotá, Colombia. Att:François</p>');

bansi · Answer 3 · 2013-07-17T13:03:11.957

I don't know about mandrill, but your $content string has double quotes" in it and your delimiter in the $postString is also double quotes. This is going to break in any language. You need to escape the double quotes in the $content as required by mandril.

"html": "' . $content . '", will translate to

"html": "<p>this is the emails html <a href="www.google.co.uk">content</a></p>",
                                            ^                ^

Try

 "html": "' . str_replace('"','\\"',$content) . '",
 "text": "' . str_replace('"','\\"',$content_text) . '",

Instead of

 "html": "' . $content . '",
 "text": "' . $content_text . '",

Worked great! Thanks so much! Think my eyes must have gone blurry and not noticed! — Dan, Jul 21 '13 at 10:25

Brian C · Answer 4 · 2018-08-02T03:05:17.517

The PHP Mandrill API error: "Mandrill_ValidationError - You must specify a key value"

This error can also indicate that json_encode() is failing to encode and returning an empty string. When the empty string is submitted to Mandrill via curl, it fails to let you know that it got totally empty POST content, and instead issues the helpful message "You must specify a key value".

Obviously this problem could be mitigated by better detection at several levels:

Mandrill at API level could return an error like "Empty POST"
The Mandrill.php API class could return an error like "json_encode fail, possible non-base64 image or content problem"
The Mandrill.php API class could check for non-base64 content in images and give an error like "unencoded image"
It would be kind of nice if json_encode() threw some sort of error (not sure re this one)

None of this is being done at this point, hence this was unnecessarily hard to debug.

The simple fix in my case was to effectively change code to run base64_encode() before including image content, that is:

          'content' => base64_encode(file_get_content("image.jpg"),

A better fix is, as above, to upgrade the Mandrill.php API file to detect a failure to encode and throw an error.

adding `base64_encode()` around mPDF's string value fixed my problem, Thanks. — contemplator, Sep 26 '18 at 18:01

score 0 · Answer 5 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:54

Have been experimenting with Dan's curl setup to post html enriched messages to Mandrill, but this time using html in the template_content: [] array of the message/send-template.json api.

What i noticed was that this setup (fix by Bansi included) seemed to work in Mandrill's try out page : https://mandrillapp.com/api/docs/messages.JSON.html#method=send-template

But in my php script, i kept receiving this stubborn You must specify a key value error. Apparantly thanks to this thread, i solved the issue by adding utf8 as charset to the request headers:

$ch = curl_init();
$headers = array("Content-type: application/json;charset=\"utf-8\""); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $uri);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER,$headers);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postString);

$result = curl_exec($ch);

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Mar 18 '20 at 15:10

In Laravel 7.x, Mandrill is no longer part of core. If, like me, you are using therobfonz/laravel-mandrill-driver, you might also see a similar error if you fail to set Mandril key in your .env file.

I had this MANDRILL_SECRET=h3xxxx but I needed this MANDRILL_KEY=h3xxxx.

To verify which key you are calling, look for this chunk in config\services.php

    // Mandrill is no longer core laravel...
    'mandrill' => [
        'secret' => env('MANDRILL_KEY'),
    ],

Another symptom of not calling your key is that your failed calls will not show up in your Mandrill api-log listings (since the missing key means Mandrill.com doesn't know where to post the failed attempt).

score -1 · Answer 7 · answered Oct 29 '13 at 08:49

-1

Also you need to be remove new lines from html code:

$content = trim(preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $content));

answered Oct 29 '13 at 08:49

Arvat Vladimir

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Mandrill ValidationError

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