WP SES Disabled & Can’t Upgrade after WP 4.75 Auto-Upgrade or Other Fail

Hello,

We’re running a site on Amazon servers with WP-SES, which appeared to be working perfectly until May 15th or 16th, 2017. The client reported no longer receiving emails from the site as expected starting May 16th, 2017. Looking in our email log (Using WP Mail Logging on the site), all emails since the one sent on 2017-05-16 11:05:11 have returned the error ‘Could not instantiate mail function.’ Prior emails worked fine.

The site was updated to WP 4.7.5 on 2017-05-16 23:17:49. Though this is *later* than the first email fail I suspect it *could* have something to do with server clock and/or timezones… so still seems the likely culprit.

More likely… it appears that someone, possibly the client or an auto-update attempt was done via bulk plugin uploader for WP SES from v0.49 to v??

Here’s the data from Simple History.

Key Value
id 70387
logger SimplePluginLogger
level info
date 2017-05-15 11:49:53
message Updated plugin “{plugin_name}” to {plugin_version} from {plugin_prev_version}
initiator wp_user
context_message_key plugin_bulk_updated
plugin_slug wp-ses

Now what’s strange:

When I got word from the client about the issue, I first noted that there was a message in the WP Admin area that ‘WP-SES has been deactivated because the plugin file does not exist.”

I ftp’d in and yes, there was no plugin – WP SES folder was there, and the log directory was there, and nothing else.

I copied the version 0.49 plugin over from the Dev site, and WP saw it, though test emails still didn’t fire.

The WP Admin Plugin area notified of update available from 0.49 to 0.70 and I tried updating. It failed. I ftp’d in and saw that all the files I’d added had been deleted except the log folder again.

I thought to try to delete WP SES entirely and replace from scratch via FTP. So I tinkered with permission levels in FileZilla, successfully changing them. Nevertheless Filezilla was unable to delete the files – permission denied.

Noting also that Simple History’s title for the update event reads “Updated plugin “” to from 0.4.9″ I would think there should be a name there? Seemingly something lost in translation.

So… needing help with this.

Thanks.