Incorrectly formatted error message on engine submit.

Effectively, the code is not doing something correctly, at least for the fact that the message error should not be "Error occurred submitting sitemap to !engine: !code."; the error message you see should be "Error occurred submitting sitemap to Ask.com: -111." (similarly to the error message you see in Drupal log).

I still don't understand why there are two error messages, and only one is not correctly shown; the code present in xmlsitemap_engines_submit_sitemap() simply calls watchdog().

Was the -111 error intermitent?
If the error was always shown, it means that the module is trying to connect to a URL that is not anymore valid, or that should not used anymore (-111 means "Connection refused").

I get almost the same error in my logs except the error code number and the fact that I get it on EVERY submission.

"Error occurred submitting sitemap to Ask.com: -61."

I have tried searching for information on this error code but I couldn't find anything useful.
Interesting that both errors come from "Ask.com".

The negative error number returned by drupal_http_request() is the error code returned by a low level function, with the sign changed; you can find a list of errors on Linux System Errors. In the specific, 61 means "no data available".

Both the errors could mean there are problems on connecting to the server used to submit the sitemap to Ask.com because a problem on server side, or because a problem on client side; it's not actually possible to understand that only from the error code returned by drupal_http_request().

I tried connecting to http://submissions.ask.com using a browser, and I got the following error message: Safari can’t open the page “http://submissions.ask.com/” because Safari can’t connect to the server “submissions.ask.com”.
It seems they have problems with the server, or the URL is not anymore the one to use to submit the sitemaps to Ask.com.

http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml#22 takes to a page where the first words I read are "Q: Why aren't the pages the Ask crawler indexed showing up in the search results at Ask.com?". I am not sure how that is related with the problem reported here.

EDIT: I also tried to insert a complete submission URL (which included the URL of the sitemap to submit) in a browser, but the error has been the same. The real problem is that the server is not replying to any requests.
Their web site don't report any changes in the URL to use to submit a sitemap, nor that they are having any problems with the server.

@earnie: Thanks for the help; that was not what I was seeing as first text.

The link to the page doesn't report any changes to the submission URL; I would rather think the problem originally reported here is caused by some problems they are having with their server (and XML sitemap can do nothing, in such cases).

If I understood well what reported about the error message, XML sitemap doesn't have any bug. See #11, where modcteck says:

I forgot to mention in the original post that the error is coming via email sent by the "Email Logging and Alerts" module.

The problem is then with "Email Logging and Alerts", which seems to report in an email the error messages the modules emit through watchdog().

The problem with the Logging and alerts module is a known issue in the latest official release but has been fixed in the development build.
#303369: log message in email without variables

Since the original reported issue is not a problem with XML sitemap, I'm marking as won't fix. Please file new issues for the ask.com error codes since those are not technically incorrectly formatted error messages.