Email Notifications Not Always Sending

Hi @thekatbrady

Not sure what to suggest here as we’re not doing anything drastic or custom for emailing. We stick with core wp_mail() to send everything.

Hi,

That makes sense. I don’t think that would be the problem per se. My guess is that something is going wrong with the submission regardless of the email notification.

I have tried to find a way in the Constant Contact dashboard to see if any submission was recorded (whether or not an email notification was sent) and I can’t find something to that extent. Is there someplace I can find this?

At this point I have narrowed down my options as to where the issue is coming from down to this plugin.

To make sure we’re on the same page, are you referring to the confirmation email that you configured with your list within the Constant Contact dashboard?

Asking because we don’t do anything with that email notification from the plugin. The only emails we send from the context of the plugin are to the site administrators about new signups or if we’re experiencing some issues.

What I am referring to is the email notification that is sent from the WordPress pluggin when someone submits a form.

When a form is created with the plugin there is an option that reads: “Check this option to disable emails for this Constant Contact Forms form.”

We keep that option unchecked. We use the forms for a variety of contact forms and have them set up through the Constant Contact plugin so that we can give people the option to sign up for our newsletter when they submit a form.

The issue is that most of the time this notification is sent out from the plugin on a form submission without issue but we are getting more and more users letting us know that they submitted a form that we never got a receipt/notification of.

To try to figure out this issue we are using WP Mail Tracking to see if there are issues in sending out the notification; this plugin tracks both failed and successful emails out from WordPress. When a notification from the Constant Contact plugin fails to send we are not getting any record of this either way. Likewise, we use WP MAIL SMTP to use our SMTP server to send emails. This plugin has a debug mode that tracks when an email out event is triggered with WordPress. We find that this debug tool is not tracking when the Constant Contact plugin fails to send a notification.

That is leading us to the conclusion that there is an issue with the forms themselves. Our users are claiming that they are successfully submitting the forms and getting a “Submission Successful” message in the front end, however, we are not even recording an attempt email being sent out by the Constant Contact plugin.

So to recap, we usually get a notification when a form is successfully submitted but there seems to be an increasing amount of times when a notification is not sent. On those occasions, there are no indications in the various debug tools we are using that the plugin even attempted to send a notification.

Thank you for that information.

“Check this option to disable emails for this Constant Contact Forms form.”

This option is only meant to disable emails to administrators notifying them that someone else visiting the site has signed up. We allowed the ability to disable that notification, but will sometimes override that in cases of urgency around issues with submissions, like the account authentication is breaking.

The plugin itself does not notify the people signing up in any way. We let the email/notification system from constantcontact.com handle those parts, including things like double opt in, and any customized confirmation messages have been provided there.

I believe we have notes internally to help streamline some of the messaging/process, but at least as of the current version, a message like “Submission successful” is more regarding submitting the form successfully, but not yet guaranteed successful addition to the list(s) associated with the form. That’s still separate API requests that could fail (though we’re doing more to capture failure attempts so that we can re-try)

You’re response misses what I’m saying.

I’m not talking at all about emails to the users who submitted the forms.

I’m talking about an issue with the email notifications that are meant to be sent to the Admins from the WordPress plugin; the notification that that option turns on and off. Those aren’t happening consistently and we’re missing a lot of messages from our users because of it.

• This reply was modified 3 weeks ago by thekatbrady.

My apologies, I did misread parts of that above.

The biggest question is going to be if there’s reason why the code may or may not be exiting out before it gets to the wp_mail() call.

For example, if there’s the opt in checkbox enabled for a given form, and if it’s not checked, that looks like it’s one path that will email, but not add to the list because they didn’t say yes to the requirement.

There’s a spot that I can find that will only email the admin user if the API request succeeded. On top of that, the plugin is meant to be able to act as a very basic contact form without the list addition. This is mostly for when not connected yet to an account.

To help determine where the troublesome path is, have these people also not been getting added to the chosen list for the forms? Or have they been added, but they still reached out to you?

Additionally how often is this happening? Asking because we could enable some built in logging and let things happen over the course of say a day or two and then review what gets added to the logs, to see if anything stands out for a possible issue.

Thank you for your reply.

That makes sense that there may be spots in which the script is failing before it reaches wp_mail() .

For context, most of our forms on our site (all running through Constant Contact) are acting as a basic contact form; with the addition of the “opt-in” checkbox to consent to signing up for Newsletters.

To help determine where the troublesome path is, have these people also not been getting added to the chosen list for the forms? Or have they been added, but they still reached out to you?

So I don’t think all of our users are checking the “opt-in” box. That said, I am actually curious as to where in the Constant Contact dashboard I can inspect this. I had asked this question a few posts back but it must have gotten hidden in the shuffle. I would love to verify if they are being added to a list or not. I agree that this will help narrow things down greatly.

As a side note: I have run personal tests on all forms. What makes this issue a bit difficulty on my end is that I can’t replicate a failed submission/failed notification. The forms seem to work regardless of if the “opt-in” checkbox is clicked or not. So clicking the checkbox doesn’t seem to affect the result if that helps narrow it down at all.

Additionally how often is this happening?

We get maybe 1-3 emails from our users a week letting us know that they submitted a form but that it doesn’t seem like we got their submission; when I inspect my tracking pluggins I always confirm that we had not been sent a notification from the system. This has been happening for over a year and seems to be getting worse. I’m also assuming that there are many more users who we are not getting notifications for their submissions who have not contacted us about this.

Let me know if you want me to send over my Constant Contact plugin debug logs.

Thank you again for your assistance.

Definitely part of the details about the opt-in checkbox is that if that field is used, then it needs to be checked in order to be added to the lists associated with that given form. Using the opt-in isn’t required as a whole, but there are areas of the world where it’s a more legal requirement.

Regarding cross checking, it’d really need to have the email notification trail as well because the non-opt-in checks would normally still send the admin message, but those specific ones wouldn’t get into the constantcontact.com dashboard area.

Our concern isn’t whether or not users are being added to lists and I understand that aspect of the opt-in button.

Again, the issue is that we aren’t getting the email notifications to admin. The emails that are to be sent to the Admin when a form is submitted, if that setting is turned on, aren’t being delivered. Not only aren’t they being delivered, but it appears the the wp_mail() function isn’t even being called sometime as we do not have records of that in either of the secondary plugins we have installed to monitor.

I want to be very clear because every once in a while it seems like we are going in circles. It did appear like 2 responses back we were starting to go in the right direction.

The issue is specifically that the email notifications to the admin are failing in a way the the wp_mail() function isn’t even being recorded as firing.

To the topic of cross-checking, the only information that is being recorded that may have information about this issue is the Constant Contact plugin debug logs. Would you like me to send them?

• This reply was modified 2 weeks ago by thekatbrady.

To the topic of cross-checking, the only information that is being recorded that may have information about this issue is the Constant Contact plugin debug logs. Would you like me to send them?

Definitely worth a quick look.

How would you like me to send the debug logs? I can send you a list of form submissions we didn’t receive recently as well.

You can send anything needing private correspondence, to [email protected] and we will get notified of it and be able to access/communicate there as needed.

Thank you

Just checking to see if you had reached out yet @thekatbrady? We haven’t seen anything come through so far.