Not able to schedule an e-mail

Hi Pedro!

Thanks for the heads up. I will try and reproduce the issue you’re seeing.

Sincerely,

Randy Sandberg

Hi Pedro,

I’ve tried to reproduce your reported issue but am not having any luck. Can you please provide as much detail as possible? For example, what operating system and browser are you using? Plus, if you can point to your WordPress site that would be helpful as well. And exact steps to reproduce would be super helpful as well.

Of course, what version of WordPress and our plugin you’re using is critical information. ??

Thanks!

Randy Sandberg

Hi Randy,
To continue this topic.

– The blog which I’m working is https://www.andrezadicaeindicadisney.com.br/
– WordPress 4.1.11
– Plugin Benchmark Email Lite Vers?o 2.6 [Development]

What I observed: I can schedule emails via WP interface (to grab template and post information), but when I log in inside Benchmark’s interface and to My Emails, the email is set to “Draft” and the schedule date is not recognized. Seems to be a failure between the schedule date setting inside WP and the schedule date on Benchmark.

Attached: print screen of Benchmark with all emails incorrectly set to Draft (Rascunho in portuguese).
https://postimg.org/image/5tv7z145t/

Thanks,
Pedro

Hi Pedro,

I’ve tried to reproduce your issue but have had no luck. I too ran WordPress 4.1.11 (why so old?!) and selected Schedule delivery. At Benchmark it’s Send Status was Scheduled until it changed to Sent.

Note that I am running WordPress locally on my Mac using MAMP 3.5. The browser I used was Mac Safari 9.1.1.

Are you able to successfully Send a test email and Send immediately? Moreover, what operating system/browser(s)/version(s) are you using to reproduce this issue? Oh, and does this happen all the time of is the issue intermittent? And, have you ever been able to Schedule delivery???

Thanks,

Randy

I’m using OSX Yosemite 10.10.5 on Chrome Version 50.0.2661 to schedule. But I’ve also teste with Safari 9.1.1. Does the OS or the browser have any influence on that? Since it’s a server back-end routine.

Now nothing works anymore.
When I Send Test Email, it doesn’t work (it was working).
When I selected Send Immediately, it doesn’t work.
When I schedule, also doesn’t work.

But the problem is the same I stated: the e-mail is saved inside Benchmark, but stays in “Draft” mode. And it got even worst: when I visualize the e-mail, it has nothing, the template is not working. It’s like a blank e-mail.

Do you think the WordPress version have influence on that? Or the dev version I’m using of the plugin?

Hi Pedro,

It just dawned on me, LOL, that you are using our DEV version of the plugin. Yeah, sometimes I can be quite slow to the draw! Anyway, that got me all excited thinking maybe that was why you were seeing the scheduling bug and I wasn’t even though we’re both using WordPress 4.1.11 (why???).

So, I just tested WordPress 4.11.1 and the DEV version 2.6 of our plugin and was still not able to reproduce the issue where scheduled emails make it to Benchmark Email but never get sent out. ??

And, given your recent findings that nothing works I am very concerned about just what the heck is going on. Have you called Benchmark Email themselves at 800.430.4095 yet to make sure everything is okay from their standpoint? Oh, and can you send out an email from your BenchmarkEmail.com account?

As for asking about what OS/browser/version you’re using, I’m a Software Test Engineer by trade so that’s usually the first thing I want to know about regardless of whether or not it is possibly a piece of the solution puzzle or not. That is, when trying to reproduce a difficult to reproduce bug, there’s no such things as too much information! ??

P.S., I am having trouble as of late sending test emails out and have alerted Sean about the issue. But, like I have said, I myself haven’t had any trouble sending out regular emails nor scheduled ones.

Well Randy, back to the subject.

I’ve updated my WordPress version to the latest and started testing again, noticing a very strange behaviour that could be the specific point on this.

I’ve tested sending the e-mail using a very simple template, simple html with the tags. It worked. I came back to my template, it doesn’t work. So the issue was on my code.

I’ve remade the template from scratch using one of Litmus responsive templates. It’s encoded in UTF-8, which made the whole post with weird characters. So I changed to ISO-8859-1 to work with latin characters, but didn’t work too.

So I made a change on the html head, added the line of code:
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1″>

Which is the reason that the emails were blank. The reason it wasn’t scheduling, keeping in draft. So, basically, the reason of all bugs.

Why is that happening? And how do I insert the ISO-8859-1 charset information on my html to work with latin characters?

Well, I’ve changed to:
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″>

And now it worked. Don’t know why, it wasn’t working!
So, the issue all this time was the charset. So lame. Sooooo lame.

Why does Benchmark make the e-mail blank when using ISO-8859-1 charset????

He Pedro. We can follow-up with the Benchmark Email technicians on this. I’ll have Randy test adding that META tag with ISO-8859-1 and some desired characters in an email. Are there any other steps to reproduce we should be aware of?

We’ll update you once we have a reproducible case on our end and we’ve heard back from Benchmark Email on recommendations. Thanks for reporting this issue to us.

For the meantime, I believe UTF-8 would support all of the latin characters that you would need to use for PT_BR (Portuguese Brazil) locale. Is that correct?

Thanks,
Sean

Hey Pedro,

I was all excited for a moment being that in a comment above you said you had replaced out UTF-8 meta line with this one:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

Which caused blank emails and scheduling issues. Take note of the last bit ISO-8859-1"> and then at ours. Yours was missing a space and a slash ISO-8859-1" /> so I just had to test both ways.

Sadly, whether I used

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

or

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

Both produced perfect (i.e., non-blank!) emails as well as scheduled emails were properly delivered.

Thus, being that you were able to narrow down the issue and technically resolve it, I’d love for you to post your entire template that failed for you. That I can test on my site. If I still cannot reproduce your observations then I will need to simulate your post as well. But, for now, just the entire ISO-8859-1 template contents will be fine.

Thanks in advance! ??