Help! Receiving THOUSANDS of “Your Weekly WP Mail SMTP Summary” since 2pm!

Did you manage to resolve this? We’re getting the same issue, but noticed that you haven’t received any assistance after a week. How did it go for you? Am hoping (if you resolved it) that you might have some advice on what worked for you.

Cheers

Hi there @elliotatgvm and @dan1980,

My name is David and I’m with our support team. I do apologize for the delay in our response. Are either of you still experiencing this issue? If you’re still running into this, would it be possible for you to provide a list of your active plugins? It’s possible that this is being caused by a conflict with another plugin.

If the issue stopped, did it stop on its own? Or did you do something that made it stop? If you stopped it, what did you do that made it stop? If it stopped on its own, how long did it go before it finally stopped?

Thanks in advance!

Hi there, thank you @dpinson for the reply, it seems to have calmed right down, but I didn’t do anything different or update anything specific. At the moment it is now just sending approximately 2 per day (for a “weekly” summary) instead of dozens every day. So it’s still strangely happening daily instead of weekly.

I ended up disabling the summaries altogether. I did receive a response back to the contact form I submitted- it was recommended to install another plugin to control it, but I try to keep our plugins to a minimum.

I do want to take the opportunity to say- very disappointed in the customer service received in this experience. The email I received back from my contact form was more concerned with confirming my payment information than helping the issue or getting to the root of it. I’m a Lite user, so I’m directed to this forum for support inquiries. Had I waited for a response, I’d legitimately have tens of thousands of summaries in my email by now, on top of an above-average Postmark bill. Seriously, the volume I received in a single afternoon was nothing short of insane.

@dan1980 I disabled summaries under the “Misc” tab in plugin settings if you’re inclined to do the same

@elliotatgvm Thank you for the feedback, this is very helpful. It’s cropped back up again and suddenly we’re getting half a dozen “weekly” summaries just today alone (and counting). Am going to disable it under Misc (thanks for spotting that).

Any recommendations on an alternative plug-in we could consider altogether? Or are you sticking with this one for now?

Hi there @dan1980 and @elliotatgvm,

Are either of you using WooCommerce or the Action Scheduler plugin? If you’re using WooCommerce, please let us know which version of the Action Scheduler is in use. You can find the version on the Status page of WooCommerce:

https://d.pr/i/Or2Hew

We’re looking into what may be causing this to happen so we can help get the issue corrected.

Additionally, we do try to respond to support requests here much faster than this. We certainly do appreciate your patience and apologize for the delay and inconvenience you’ve both experienced.

Have a great day!

Hi @dpinson thanks for the update (and I do appreciate the stress around this one, to be honest we’re seeing a higher than normal volume of wider issues across the WordPress ecosystem; supply-chain false-positives with malicious code, Google re: malicious polyfills in maps that could be a false-positive again, and on and on; never seen so much disruption in such a short time frame)

Anyway, that aside – no in my situation that particular site experiencing the issue does not use WooCommerce or the Action Scheduler

Thanks for the response @dan1980. Are you running more than one site? If so, are there any particular plugins that run on this particular site that aren’t running on the unaffected site(s)?

We’re still investigating to find out why this is happening. We certainly do appreciate your patience. As long as the Weekly Summaries are disabled, that should prevent them from being sent.

I’ll let you know what our team finds as soon as I have more details from our side.

Thanks!

Hmmm well nothing out of the ordinary. I guess the only plug-ins on this site that are different to other comparable ones are RankMath SEO (whereas others have Yoast, etc), plus Advanced Custom Fields PRO, WP File Manager. Maybe just those are the differences compared to other sites.

Hey @dan1980,

Can you send over screenshots of the Tools > Scheduled Actions section of WP Mail SMTP? We need to check the Complete and Pending tasks. We need to check the most recent 20 items. Additionally, we’ll need to see the most recent completed wp_mail_smtp_summary_report_email?actions. You can use the search field to find those. Here is an example:

https://a.supportally.com/i/V8WBcx

In the example above, I only had 4 that were available to show, but it should give you an idea of what I’m referring to.

Additionally, if you can post a backtrace of some of the duplicated emails, that should help. To get a backtrace, you would need to enable Debug Email Sending in the Debug section. Then, the Weekly Summary would need to send multiple copies again so the debug tool can capture data about email being sent. It won’t store the content of the email, but it should capture additional information about the sending process.

Here is an example:

https://a.supportally.com/i/CpqfgG

In the example, you’ll see that the hosting username was blurred out. You can do the same if you would like. In my case, I used Droplr, but if you’d prefer just copy/paste the text in a response and then delete anything sensitive, that works too.

I hope that helps! Thanks!

Sorry @dpinson I don’t want to kind of hijack @elliotatgvm ‘s original post and really just checked in to see if @elliotatgvm found a solution. But I guess my situation might be different. So I’ve checked and the issue is that this site has WP Rocket installed and it’s queuing countless things there so in the Scheduler I don’t see anything for wp_mail_smtp (perhaps because I’ve just turned off the weekly summaries altogether to just get the excessive emails under control and stop them altogether.

Thankfully at the time we already had Debug on, so here are a small sample of the logs from 3rd July (after which I had turned off Weekly Summaries)

Event #20955 Debug An email request was sent. WP Mail SMTP July 3, 2024 at 3:00 am
Event #20954 Debug An email request was sent. WP Mail SMTP July 3, 2024 at 3:00 am
Event #20953 Debug An email request was sent. WP Mail SMTP July 3, 2024 at 2:25 am
Event #20952 Debug An email request was sent. WP Mail SMTP July 3, 2024 at 2:25 am
Event #20951 Debug An email request was sent. WP Mail SMTP July 3, 2024 at 2:25 am
Event #20950 Debug An email request was sent. WP Mail SMTP July 3, 2024 at 2:25 am

etc…

And here is a redacted version of the last one (event #20955)

WP Mail SMTP

/var/www/vhosts/WEBSITE-DOMAIN-GOES-HERE/httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/wp-mail-smtp/src/Reports/Emails/Summary.php (line: 112)

Backtrace:
[0] wp_mail called at [/var/www/vhosts/WEBSITE-DOMAIN-GOES-HERE/httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/wp-mail-smtp/src/Reports/Emails/Summary.php:112]
[1] WPMailSMTP\Reports\Emails\Summary->send called at [/var/www/vhosts/WEBSITE-DOMAIN-GOES-HERE/httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/wp-mail-smtp/src/Tasks/Reports/SummaryEmailTask.php:75]
[2] WPMailSMTP\Tasks\Reports\SummaryEmailTask->process called at [/var/www/vhosts/WEBSITE-DOMAIN-GOES-HERE/httpdocs/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php:324]
[3] WP_Hook->apply_filters called at [/var/www/vhosts/WEBSITE-DOMAIN-GOES-HERE/httpdocs/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php:348]
[4] WP_Hook->do_action called at [/var/www/vhosts/WEBSITE-DOMAIN-GOES-HERE/httpdocs/wp-includes/plugin.php:565]
[5] do_action_ref_array called at [/var/www/vhosts/WEBSITE-DOMAIN-GOES-HERE/httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/seo-by-rank-math/vendor/woocommerce/action-scheduler/classes/actions/ActionScheduler_Action.php:56]
[6] ActionScheduler_Action->execute called at [/var/www/vhosts/WEBSITE-DOMAIN-GOES-HERE/httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/seo-by-rank-math/vendor/woocommerce/action-scheduler/classes/abstracts/ActionScheduler_Abstract_QueueRunner.php:88]
[7] ActionScheduler_Abstract_QueueRunner->process_action called at [/var/www/vhosts/WEBSITE-DOMAIN-GOES-HERE/httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/seo-by-rank-math/vendor/woocommerce/action-scheduler/classes/ActionScheduler_QueueRunner.php:169]
[8] ActionScheduler_QueueRunner->do_batch called at [/var/www/vhosts/WEBSITE-DOMAIN-GOES-HERE/httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/seo-by-rank-math/vendor/woocommerce/action-scheduler/classes/ActionScheduler_QueueRunner.php:139]
[9] ActionScheduler_QueueRunner->run called at [/var/www/vhosts/WEBSITE-DOMAIN-GOES-HERE/httpdocs/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php:324]
[10] WP_Hook->apply_filters called at [/var/www/vhosts/WEBSITE-DOMAIN-GOES-HERE/httpdocs/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php:348]
[11] WP_Hook->do_action called at [/var/www/vhosts/WEBSITE-DOMAIN-GOES-HERE/httpdocs/wp-includes/plugin.php:565]
[12] do_action_ref_array called at [/var/www/vhosts/WEBSITE-DOMAIN-GOES-HERE/httpdocs/wp-cron.php:191]

I hope that helps!

Hi @dan1980,

Thanks for sending that over. I passed it over to our team so we can check further into this. I’ll let you know when I have more information.

Thanks!

Hi there @dan1980,

Can you let us know which version of Rank Math SEO you’re using? Also, for the duplicate emails, do they have the same backtrace? Basically, we’re trying to find out if duplicates have the same backtrace as each other.

Thanks!

Hi @dpinson sure, it’s Version 1.0.223 (the latest as far as I know). Backtrace? You mean basically what’s the Sender IP etc. etc.. in the headers. I’ll double-check and get back to you asap

Hi again @dpinson I’ve checked and they’re all the same IP. In-fact as an example, all the ones that came through in the 3rd July example (all on the same day) actually seem like separate instances of the report, rather than duplicates/triplicates/etc of an individual report.

I can see that the “Weekly” report regenerated itself 6 separate times over the course of 1 day and the data inside each was slightly different:

....you've sent with WP Mail SMTP. Total Emails 247 +216.7% Last......
....you've sent with WP Mail SMTP. Total Emails 248 +213.9% Last......
....you've sent with WP Mail SMTP. Total Emails 243 +228.4% Last......
....you've sent with WP Mail SMTP. Total Emails 245 +222.4% Last......
etc.......