‘Email sent’ but not received.

If the plugin was working and now it is not, what has changed?

When email just “stops working” it is usually due to a change with your web infrastructure. Have you checked with your hosting provider to see if they have changed how they handle email? Sometimes hosting providers limit the number of emails which can be sent or limit the number which can be sent in a specific time period.

Can you get any emails to work? Email to a single user? Email to a 2-3 users? Groups?

If no emails at work, does any email from your site work? Email Users uses wp_mail() to send email which is the same function the WordPress login, registration, and comment notification system all use.

Hi Mike,

Thanks for taking the time to have a look at my issue. I have contacted my hosting provider to see if anything has changed in the handling of mail.

Currently Email to single user, and groups, are both not working for me.

The only email function that appears to be working properly for us is the new user email that is generated and sent to users when a new account is created.

What should I be doing to troubleshoot this issue, outside of contacting my hosting provider.

Thanks again Mike!

Email Users has a “debug” capability which allows you to look at the email headers the plugin creates prior to sending the email. When in Debug mode Email Users doesn’t actually send the email*, it shows a “debug” dump of the headers on the Dashboard. This allows you to examine the headers and see if what Email Users has constructed matches what you think it should be doing.

This is a pretty good place to start. Sometimes the users expected to be in the headers aren’t because their Email Users settings are set not to receive mail.

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* I have heard of several instances where Email Users is still sending email when in debug mode. While it should not be doing this, it relies on using a WordPress hook to intercept the email before sending it. If another plugin uses this same hook, it is possible that email will still be sent. The safest thing to do is temporarily disable all other plugins except Email Users while in debug mode to minimize the possibility of sending an inadvertent email.

Did you ever sort this out with your hosting provider? Another idea I had was most WordPress email use the TO header to send email where as Email Users makes extensive use of the BCC field. Some hosting providers disable BCC email headers because spammers use it.

Hi Mike,

Thanks for checking in. Issue is still unresolved currently. They said they ran some tests for us and the add-on should be working properly. They’re not seeing any errors or anything anyway.
They installed the wp-mail-smtp add-on for us previously, but they said it looks to be configured properly.

Are there any specific settings we need for wp-mail-smtp to have it work correctly with the email users plugin?

Thanks in advance.

Hi Mike,

I was wondering how I would access the ‘debug’ mode for the plugin.

Thanks in advance!

There is a checkbox on the plugin settings (Dashboard > Settings > Email Users) to enable debug mode. It is a setting you don’t want to leave on permanently as it attempts to intercept email as WordPress processes it and before it hands it off to the underlying OS mail transport.

When enabled, you do the normal “Send to Users”, “Send to Group” or “Notify Users” operation like you would during normal operation. When you press the Send button the Dashboard will update as normal but in addition to seeing the normal Dashboard content, the mail header information Email Users constructs will be output as well. It is is dumped in the format PHP stores it, the output isn’t fancy or well formatted but it does allow you to see the content of the mail headers as things like “TO”, “CC”, “BCC” and a few others will be the array keys in the information dumped out.

What you are looking for is to see if the content of the headers matches what you would expect to see for your target recipients. I recommend starting simple, pick 2-3 recipients as picking a group with hundreds of users in it can be overwhelming. By limiting it to a few users you can easily see the email addresses in the header to make sure they are formatted as expected and more importantly, all of the addresses you expect are included.

You should see the bulk of the addresses in the BCC field as that is what Email Users uses to send to more than one user at a time. If you pick a single recipient you should see their address in the TO field. The TO field will likely have the address for the admin user in it and the CC field will usually have the email address of the user sending the message.

If that all looks correct then I am not sure where to go next. wp_mail() is the WordPress API function which is used by WordPress itself to send email and Email Users uses it the same way.

Some hosting providers have rules about numbers of recipients in a BCC field which is why the BCC limit setting was added. Some hosting providers have other rules – it really varies so it is hard to know exactly what might be the issue.

Make sure you turn off debug when you are done.