WordPress 5.41: Not getting email notification of comments

  • Steve

    (@beforewisdom)


    4 years, 7 months ago

    WordPress – version 5.41
    Replyable by postmatic – Version 2.2.5

    I fixed this problem, but I thought I would post my solution to save others from the copious frustration and time spent solving this common problem that I experienced.

    I was not getting email notifications of people posting comments to my blog entries.

    I contacted my host to no avail. I Googled and found many incidents of this problem. I read about 4 of the support requests and I read about 3 of the many articles written about this problem. I checked and rechecked all manner of settings. I even installed and configured two very complicated SMTP plugins. I logged in and out of my blog numerous times to test each fix. This was all done over 4 days.

    No results.

    Then I remembered the old debugging technique of deactivating ALL of the plugins in the blog at one time.

    For the first time in months ( I gave up several times before this attempt ) I got a comment notification.

    I went through the tedious process of reactivating each of my 15 plugins one by one, logging out, posting a comment with another email address, checking my mail, and logging back in.

    I found that reactivating 4 different plugins stopped email notifications.

    Having the thought that the order I toggled the plugins on and off might have made a difference I went back to those 4 deactivated plugins and tested them again.

    I was able to activate 3 of them and keep email notifications of comments working.

    The fourth plugin killed email notifications of comments with every test:

    Replyable by postmatic – Version 2.2.5

    It inadvertently stopped email notifications of comments

    * with the default settings after installation
    * activating its one way reply feature
    * “opting in”

    The only variation I did try was signing up for the fee based settings.

    Thank you for reading my account of frustration and triumph.

    Hopefully people experiencing a similar issue will find this post via a search engine, avoid the dead ends I spent time on, and go straight to a solution

    • This topic was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by Steve.
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  • Thank you for writing up your conclusions!
    The one thing that would help everyone is to report the problem to the plugin author, so that they can fix it for all their users.

    Thread Starter Steve

    (@beforewisdom)

    Already done.

    When I deactivated it a web form came up in my blog asking me why I was removing it.

    I told them and hit the “send” button.

    Hey Steve,

    I can’t really speak to what may have been happening on your site without knowing more, but thanks for alerting us to your issue. I’ll follow up with you from our support system as we would be keen to understand what you ran into.

    In the meantime: WordPress comment notifications can be complicated and not at all intuitive. We have an article here which explains how they work, what to expect, and how to customize things (with, or without Replyable).

    Thanks for reaching out.
    Jason

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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