I recently modified our custom mass mailer script to accept attachments. After the modifications the new functionality worked nicely, except when it didn’t. Sometimes the script would error out when it accessed the Request object. When this happened I would receive the following message:
Request object error ‘ASP 0104 : 80004005’ Operation not Allowed
Though the error messages produced by ASP tend to be a bit cryptic, Microsoft sometimes does a decent job of documenting them on their web site. A quick search revealed the problem: IIS 5.x and 6 have a default request limit of 200K. That’s sufficient in most situations where you would attach something to an email, but once you start attaching multiple documents there’s a chance you’ll need a higher limit. The fix is easy enough, but does require editing the IIS metabase. Setting the AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed property to an appropriate limit (in bytes, up to 1GB max) addresses the issue. I like to use metaedit to edit the metabase, but you can also use the command-line metabase editing script:
cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/ASPMaxRequestEntityAllowed 20971520
20971520 is the limit of the request size in bytes (20M in this case).
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