Postie stopped working in December after long problem-free run

Interesting. Another user has had similar issues. Who is hosting your WordPress site and who hosts your email?

In both cases it’s the university of California, Irvine. The mail client they use is Roundcube Webmail 0.9.5 which is GNU.

The site (and postie) has been running successfully since 2011. Until just last month/year.

So you are saying the sites are hosted in the university data center? Is the mail server hosted there as well?

There weren’t any updates on Dec 16, but there was a minor update on Dec 1.

What version of WP & Postie?

Anything in the webserver logs?

There have been reports of some mail servers getting “stuck” once you manually post the messages and delete the emails it might start working again.

Also please see https://postieplugin.com/1-6-0-released-action-requred-use-external-cron/

Thanks. Turns out the problem started before Dec 16. There was a direct post (not through postie) that threw me off. Looks like the problem actually went back to November sometime. I’m wondering if the chron change was the problem to start with. When did that happen?

To answer your questions, Yes everything is in the data center. I have to get access to the web server logs. Hopefully that won’t be s hassle. I used to have full access but they moved servers awhile back (long before this problem)….

As for versions, I’m using the latest of both.

I’ll finish clearing the mailbox tonight and report back if that’s helped.

The URL change happened back in Sept.

Hmm. I’ll have to look into that, but it can’t be the issue because I verified the last Postie generated post to the blog was 11/14/14. Everything else was a post or syndication. Can’t believe I didn’t catch this till now.

It is possible you didn’t upgrade Postie until Nov.

True, though this doesn’t explain why manually running Postie also doesn’t work.

Yes, that is very strange. What kind of PHP execution timeout is set?

Not sure. Will have to ask as I can’t look behind the curtain right now.

Hey Wayne, I discovered something else that happened in November. They changed the webmail service.

Postie seems to be able to connect just fine (according to the Postie config test). Is there anything you’ve seen before that would allow the test config to run successfully but not allow Postie to actually pull the emails?

OK. It looks like I figured out the problem. Apparently one of the recent updates to either Category Specific RSS Menu or Postie caused a conflict between the two. I don’t know which it was or why on earth these two wouldn’t get along, but as the former was ancillary at best I’ve just disabled it.

So basically I think it was two problems: One was that the external chron setting changed, so email got backed-up in the inbox, and the other was this recent plugin conflict prevented even a manual run of Postie.

Let this be a warning to others: If something breaks, check for plugin compatibility even if the two plugins have been coexisting. Any update may change the relationship.

Thanks for the update.