I am not being notified of some Some replies

Hi @ajtruckle,

The most common issues are:

• Too many users to be notified and you don’t have background notifications active
• Too many users to be notified, you *do* have background notifications, but your host has a watchdog script and is killing the process before it ends
• The message does leave the server but gets lost en-route

How many users are getting added for notifications? You can check exactly who/how many would be notified by running the Dry Run tool.

It’s a good idea to to install one of the several available email logging plugins to see if the notifications are leaving the server.

If they are and you’re still not getting them, I recommend using a third-party SMTP service such as Mailgun. They have excellent logging which will show you when a message was accepted for delivery, delivered, and even opened.

Cheers,
Vinny

Hi

I have just done a dry run and only 2 of us are listed (so me and him). So the first reason should not apply.

Background notifications are enabled.

I just realised my WP SMTP has email logging but you need the pro version which is expensive.

WP Mail Logging or WP Email Log are good alternatives. Also, if you’re using Post SMTP, you might run into issues if you ever get the Reply by Email add-on as I’ve had reports that they mess up the Reply-to headers.

But only 2 recipients should not be a problem. Try checking if your email address is the same as the Admin Email under Settings > General. If they are the same, try changing one of them as it could be that your email server may feel it’s a spoof and block/spam it.

Vinny,
There’s only two of us right now getting emails but I have had plenty of trouble with Bluehost about the fact that I was engaged in “spamming” and all of my mail had been blocked without notifying me. They made me list the addresses of my moderators, 6 at that time, their names, what the emails were for and why I wasn’t engaged in spamming. Then they would unlock my emails.

Very frustrating. It took me a while to set it up since I had to learn how WP normally sends mail and how I could bypass that, but I finally started using the SMTP plugin Post STMP. Great plugin that helped me with all the settings with Bluehost and also logs all the emails sent in my dashboard. Now I don’t get blocked by Bluehost anymore.

Lately I’ve been getting mail blocked by one of the extra email ISP’s I use for a backup to the backup. “Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 421 4.7.0 [TSS04] Messages from *.*.*.* temporarily deferred due to user complaints – 4.16.55.1; see”

Notifications are really critical for both of us since I am in the US and the other moderator is in Sydney!
My best, Patrice

This is not a problem since I receive two other copies via a forwarder and another email address.

Hi Patrice,

That message usually means your SMTP server got complaints and their IP got blocked. Using Post SMTP (or any other SMTP plugin) is only as good as the SMTP server you connect to.

I recommend trying out Mailgun. It used to be free for up to 10k messages but they’ve since changed their business model and are no longer free. But they’re still very cheap, though. Heck, depending on how many messages you expect to get per day (under 500), you can even connect to Gmail instead.

Let me know how it goes.