Occasionally EMAIL fails due to a transient error reported by the SMTP or NNTP server. This means that the server should be able to process the request if submitted at a later time. EMAIL automatically schedules a second attempt in two minutes using the WFL job EMAIL/RETRY/1. EMAIL continues retrying as long as the server reports a transient error. These subsequent retries occur after 5, 10, 30, and 60 minutes. Additional retries, if needed, occur every hour. If this happens, EMAIL returns an ERR_RETRY warning result.

When a transient error occurs, EMAIL creates a printer backup TASKFILE containing debugging information about the error. To avoid an accumulation of these files, the TASKFILE is not created by a scheduled retry (unless the TRACE option is set or a BDNAME is specified).