Cannot Send through Sparkpost with plugin

This doesn’t appear to be a problem with the plugin. I use SiteGround for most of my hosting. The SparkPost smtp IP address is not in their firewall. I am waiting to hear back from SparkPost with their IP address(es). In the meantime, I sent SiteGround support the IP address that is displays when the smtp server is pinged.

I’m having the exact same issue. No problems sending outside of the plugin, but when I attempt to send a test message through the plugin, it just hangs. Changing the port to 2525 didn’t help, unfortunately. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have had success using other SMTP plugins like Mandrill and Sendgrid, so I don’t think there are any problems with the WP installation itself.

In my case, the host’s firewall was blocking the IP address for the SparkPost SMTP server. They needed to add it to their firewall’s whitelist. It had nothing to do with the plugin.

I think the solution here is for us to use the API instead of SMTP. I know Mandrill’s plugin uses their API exclusively so that’s probably why that’s worked out of the box for you. We’ve got an open issue for this and will look at addressing ASAP: https://github.com/SparkPost/wordpress-sparkpost/issues/4

Thanks for letting us know about the issues you’ve experienced!

Victor, can you provide the IP address or addresses? I’ve been stuck getting it to work as well.

I had my host look into it, and they noticed that the 587 port was blocked for certain users. After unblocking it, the plugin worked perfectly. I agree though that using the API, or providing an API option, would be a big improvement to the plugin.

Ports are not a problem on my server as I control them, so I was more curious about Victor Font’s comments on IP addresses being blocked since it is possible my firewall may have blocked the service.

Hello
Thanks to everyone for patience :). Just wanted to follow up that a new version of this plugin is just released which allows sending over HTTP API. Please give it a try and let us know your suggestions/feedback.

Thanks

It worked for me. The test message came through right away.

I just noticed a couple things:

1. Plain-text messages with line breaks come through as big text blobs; the line breaks aren’t preserved.
2. The messages include open-tracking images even though I have all tracking disabled in the main SP account.

I have temporarily reverted back to the SMTP (port 587) sending method, so hopefully it’ll start behaving again. The previous version of the plugin didn’t exhibit either of these behaviors.

After switching back to the SMTP method, both issues above went away.

Hello @morleyt

For #1, Just a while ago, I’ve verified that there is some issue with content type (specially html). I’ve created an issue in our issue tracker. Please follow that issue for the updates as we’ll keep posted there.

For #2, the plugin does not do anything with tracking image. It depends on your settings in your SparkPost account. However, SparkPost takes sometime to synchronize your tracking settings. So if you tried immediate after flipping tracking settings, I’ll suggest to try it again. If it’s still an issue, please feel free to create in issue in our issue tracker.

Thanks

It seems the tracking settings in the SparkPost control panel are specific to SMTP relay, and don’t impact transmissions sent through the API. I noticed that in testing the API outside of the plugin, I had to specifically disable tracking in the transmission JSON for it to be disabled. Ideally, the tracking settings set through the SparkPost site would be global as opposed to specific to SMTP.

I’m going to make a request with SparkPost support about that, but I guess another approach would be to give plugin users the option to specify their open tracking and click tracking preferences and send those along with each transmission.

Hello @morleyt
Thanks for providing more information. There is an ticket created to address this one. Please follow https://github.com/SparkPost/wordpress-sparkpost/issues/11 for updates.