emails not sending

Deactivating and reactivating the plugin won’t help. Email Users has almost no initialization code and what little it has, simply initializes the database with the default plugin settings. If the plugin has been installed previously, the initialization doesn’t do anything.

1. When you say it isn’t sending, does it appear to be sending on the WordPress side yet nothing is ever received by any email address?
2. Have you tried setting the “Copy Sender” checkbox on the settings page to see if you, the email address for the WordPress user sending the email, receives the message as well?
3. Have you checked the spam folder on the recipient end?
4. Do you have debug mode enabled?
5. How many people received the first two emails which worked?

When something works a few times and then stops yet you haven’t changed anything on the WordPress side, I suspect that some sort of hosting limit is kicking in. Usually some sort of anti-spam protection. Is the 100 email limit 100 messages or 100 recipients per hour? There is a big difference. Do you have a BCC limit set?

On the WordPress side it says the email is sent. I always have copy send checked and do receive a copy of the email when it sends. I’ve checked the spam and junk folders – no emails there. Everyone on the list (220+ email addresses) got the first two emails.

I’ve tried enabling debug mode but don’t know what to look for there. Here is what the PHP Mailer Debug says:

PHPMailer Object
(
[Priority] => 3
[CharSet] => UTF-8
[ContentType] => text/html
[Encoding] => 8bit
[ErrorInfo] =>
[From] => [email protected]
[FromName] => Michele Morris
[Sender] =>
[ReturnPath] =>
[Subject] => News from Colorado Authors’ League
[Body] =>

I think that means there isn’t an error showing up.

The email limit from Bluehost is 100 emails per hour – and they confirmed their records show that I sent only 2 today, the first 2 that went successfully.

Now weirdly, two test messages just came through at once – the only thing I changed was that I unchecked the “copy sender” box, saved, did a test message, then rechecked the box, saved, and did a test message.

Now I just tried sending the page I was trying to email earlier and it worked and went through.

SO…I don’t know what all that means, but it seems it’s not on the hosting side, seems it is somewhere in the plugin – by changing that selection I was able to get it working again, so I’ll just leave you with this information to help you figure out if there is something tricky hiding in the code there.

Thanks!

There should be more information in the debug content, in particular I’d be looking for the BCC field which should have all of the email addresses that will receive the email unless there is only one (1) recipient in which case it will use the TO field in the header for the recipient.

Since there isn’t a BCC or TO field in what you posted above, either you provided only part of the debug information or something else is wrong.

It is unlikely you want to post all of the header information with you customer email addresses here in the support forum. If you want to move to email, you can contact me at mpwalsh8 at gmail dot com.

Sometimes there is a lag in sending email and when it is received and that is way outside the scope of WordPress or the Email Users plugin. Simply checking or unchecking the copy sender option won’t have any effect on whether or not the email is successfully sent.

I don’t think the issue is just lag time as these unsent messages are never coming through. So something else is happening but I don’t know what!

I’m going to keep debug on and if it doesn’t send again, I’ll confirm no issues with the hosting company first and then if needed contact you via email with the full debug info to see if we can figure it out.

Thanks for the help.

If you leave debug on, email is never actually sent. The is a “feature” of debug mode so you can see what would be sent if mail was actually sent. Since most people don’t want to spam their recipients until they’re really ready to send their content, debug mode intercepts the actual send of email just prior to it actually being sent and generates the debug display.

There is a pretty detailed explanation (with pictures) of debug mode on my web site here.

I got a copy of the email when it was in debug mode – does it go to the sender if sender box is checked when it is in debug mode? I did see that it is not supposed to send in debug mode, but I saw that I got it I thought I was misunderstanding. THX

Off the top of my head I don’t remember, I’ll have to look at the code. I’ll try and do that sometime this afternoon.

This morning I’m still having trouble sending emails. I had two blog posts to notify users about – the first one went through right away, no problem, but the second one never sent. I then did a test message to myself and that did not send.

So I enabled debug mode and did the notify users of the blogs post and I am sending that to your vie the email address you shared with me. Can you see if there is anything you see in there that prevents it from sending.

The only consistent things I see about the email failing:

The first one I do on any given day always seems to go through – it’s the second or third one then that seems to have trouble

When I am having trouble sending an email, Bluehost shows no activity on the server at all – they tell me that means nothing was sent.

Thank you for your help.

BLuehost was able to pull this up from the error log:

[12-Jan-2014 19:38:57 UTC] WordPress database error MySQL server has gone away for query SELECT * FROM tkw_posts WHERE (post_type = ‘page’ AND post_status = ‘publish’) ORDER BY menu_order,tkw_posts.post_title ASC made by require(‘wp-blog-header.php’), require_once(‘wp-includes/template-loader.php’), include(‘/themes/utility/404.php’), get_footer, locate_template, load_template, require_once(‘/themes/utility/footer.php’), wp_list_pages, get_pages

I did uninstall the plugin and reinstall it as they advised, but I still can’t send emails.
THX

I was away for the weekend, sorry for the delayed response.

That is a pretty standard query, it is doing nothing more than selecting all the pages from your WordPress database. No idea why that would cause a MySQL error. From the list of files you provided, it appears that your site is generating a 404 page.

However, I don’t think that error has anything to due with Email Users not sending email out.

The fact that you stated it works once or twice per day then stops indicates to me you are running into a limit of some sort. I don’t know how BlueHost does their mail limiting but Googling about BlueHost and mail limits brings up lots of articles. It appears BlueHost limits somewhere between 50 and 750 email messages per day.

1. How many susbscribers do you have?
2. What do you have the BCC limit set to?

I think you are right that this is something with the hosting company – just not sure what and will continue to work with them. When I try to send 2 or 3 emails back to back it happens, but when I send just 1, it never happens. If I send 1 now, then wait a few hours and send, it’s fine. So it’s something to do with their limits and I’ll work with them to try to resolve. Thanks for patience and help trying to figure it out.

Yes, that sounds like you are running into their limits on number of emails per hour.

A number of people have asked about building a queueing system of some sort into Email Users which can account for this. At this point, I have no plans to do so. While I think it technically possible using wp_cron() to schedule calls to wp_mail(), it is outside the scope of what I have time to do these days.

I finally got so someone who figured that out – it was set to 150 an hour – and they very easily and willingly changed it to 550 an hour which lets me send 2 emails per hour based on my subscribers. Sorry to drag you through the mess, but at least I got it fixed!