Not Receiving Notification Emails Any More

I should add more details. When using Mailgun, other transactional emails still work. WordPress is set to approve all new comments so those emails still arrive from WP itself. Using the contact form also works. Just not sure why comment notification emails are not arriving.

Also re-tested this on a site using Sendgrid and they have also stopped working. So it looks like something beside Sendgrid vs Mailgun. Maybe a plugin conflict or server security config blocking something?

How would I go about troubleshooting this short of disabling all plugins etc…?

ok, I have no information to add. Looks like it was a combination of things. Firewall was blocking Postman to send the comment notification emails. Now that I have switched to WP Mail and using Mailgun to send out emails, everything, is going out properly again.

Now, nginx is blocking the link that allow the user to verify their subscription. Clicking on that link leads to a 403 Forbidden nginx page.

Any ideas?

Maybe I have to create a real page instead of a dynamic page. If so, what content should be included inside the Real page?

Odd thing is, when you go directly to the dynamic URL, everything works. It’s just the link from the verification email. Maybe it includes the email in the URL itself as this may be a security issue?

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by mealto.

Hi @mealto

To create a real page instead of the “virtual page” do the following:

• Go to WP Admin > StCR > Management Page
• Set “Virtual management page” to “No” and save changes
• Go to WP admin > Pages > Add New and create a page called “Comment subscriptions”, the permalink should be comment-subscriptions
• As the content of that page just add [stcr_management_page]

If it doesn’t work out let me know and we’ll see what else we can try.

Thank you. I have created the real page and included [stcr_management_page].

One other issue, it seems Postman had issues with sending out comment notifications. nginx was complaining something about Bcc, not sure exactly the error. Switched to WP Mail and everything works again. Thought to pass that along.

One other thing, our nginx server has the 6G WAF enabled. And the server was throwing an error when users clicked on the Verification link after subscribing to a comment thread. The odd thing is, when they click on the Manage Subscription link in subsequent emails, they were able to access it. I wonder if the firewall thought including too many parameters (like the user’s email) in the actual URL was blocked for security reasons? Any ideas on how to get around this? Right now, I have remove the verification link in the original email notification.

You’re welcome.

As for the BCC, do you have the option “BBC admin on notifications” enabled (WP admin > StCR > Options)? By default it’s disabled, when enabled the admin email is added as BCC and gets a copy of the notifications.

As for the firewall, it’s possible that the firewall for some reason flags the GET parameters. Can you send over the URL to the website, I’ll try out the subscription so I can get the error and then “play around” a bit with the URL to see what might be triggering it.

Thanks so much for your efforts here. Here is what I have discovered and hope this may help you as well.

1. It is indeed 6G WAF blocking bad request. The data center tech could not find an easy way to let this specific page request through the firewall. But if I disable -bad-request monitoring for the entire site, the verification link works!

2. Now, before I discovered this, I went and removed the verification link from the first email as I have “Subscribe” checked automatically. My next question is, if users who not verify, although they seem to be getting notification emails as others comment on the post, do they stay being subscribed until they remove themselves. I think I read somewhere that users who do not verify will be automatically unsubscribed after a certain length of time. If this is the case, I am forced to put the verification link back in and just disable all -bag-request within 6G WAF.

I can’t send over a real domain but here is the actual 6G error: [DATE-TIME] [“:bad_request_7:”] IPADDRESS https://www.domain.com “GET /comment-subscriptions/?LONGSTRINGUSEDTOVERIFYLINK HTTP/2.0” 403 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4103.106 Safari/537.36”

Hope that makes sense.

By the way, for the “Double Check Message”. What is the second line that includes the verification link that comes after this? I forgot to save that portion.

You have requested to be notified every time a new comment is added to:
[post_permalink]

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by mealto.

Hi @mealto

There is the 30 days limit (can be changed in WP admin > StCR > Options, you’ll see Autopurge Requests options).

But when the double check is disabled the future subscriptions will be considered as confirmed, so they won’t be automatically unsubscribed after the time limit ends.

The error message from the firewall doesn’t help much unfortunately. Are you ok with keeping it without the double check or should we try to figure out how to resolve the issue?

Thank you about the information about the Autopurge. I had that set to 0 just in case. And thank you for letting me know about the Double Check feature. I have disabled this too, at least for now.

If you want to do some testing, I would be happy to try and help. Maybe by email is best. Which contact form can I reach you at?

Thanks again!

Hi @mealto

You’re welcome.

You can contact us through the contact form at https://subscribe-reloaded.com/contact/