Mike Walsh

You can try using the Settings (Dashboard > Settings > Email Users) to change the outgoing email (try the Send User Override setting).

However, there are many cases where the underlying mail transport infrastructure changes the mail headers after WordPress hands off the email using the wp_mail() API function. If this is happening, then there isn’t anything WordPress can do.

Email Users has a debug mode where you can see the email headers the Email Users constructs when sending an email. If the header doesn’t match what you are seeing your mail client, it likely means the underlying MTA (mail transport authority) is manipulating the mail headers outside the WordPress scope.

I apologize for the delayed response. I am out of the country this week on vacation and have nothing but an iPad with me so looking at this issue is a challenge.

5000 users is a lot so it doesn’t surprise me you are seeing a problem. A number of years ago I had a similar problem with Send to Users with someone who had 8000+ users on the site. The solution was to break the query up into chunks. I cannot recall it I ever added the same solution to groups or not, based on your description I am guessing I did not.

I won’t be back in the US until Sunday and I suspect catching up on work email will take me a day or two. I will try to look into this next week when I am home. If you find a solution and want to send me a patch, I’d be happy to consider incorporating it.

The Email Users plugin doesn’t support sending attachments via email. What you are asking to do isn’t possible.

I would consider that a bug. I’ll try and take a look at it this weekend.

For regular users to be able to email each other, they have to be granted the capability. Email Users does not provide the ability to assign capabilities to a user, you’ll need to use another plugin to do that. What Email Users does do is define capabilities and if a user account has those capabilities, the user is able to perform certain actions. The capabilities Email Users defines are toward the bottom of the plugin settings page (Dashboard > Settings Email Users)

I am not familiar with Mailgun but a quick looks implies that Mailgun overloads the wp_mail() function. This is likely the reason you see the wp_mail() appears to be overloaded message. This isn’t necessarily a problem as wp_mail() is what WordPress calls a “pluggable” function which means a plugin, or in some cases, plugins, can overload the definition of wp_mail() and change its behavior.

As long as Mailgun doesn’t change the argument list that WordPress defines for wp_mail(), then it should work. At least in theory. If you look at the documentation for wp_mail() you can see that three of the five parameters can accept either a string or an array as an argument. When a plugin overloads wp_mail() it has to be written such that it handles both. Based on reading the Mailgun plugin page, with the number of installations reported, I would expect that it would handle the parameters correctly no matter how they are passed but I haven’t looked at the code to see.

A simple test would be to temporarily disable Mailgun and see if Email Users is working correctly with the default WordPress provided version of wp_mail().

• This reply was modified 6 years, 1 month ago by Mike Walsh.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 1 month ago by Mike Walsh.

Lots of questions … I’ll start with your last question since it is the easiest to answer.

Email Users will, by default, use the email address for the user currently logged in an using one of the “Send” options (Send to User, Send to Group, Notify, etc.). So if you’re logged in as user “wpsiteadmin” and that WordPress user account has the email address “[email protected]” associated with it, that is what the “From” address will be set to. You can override this but I don’t think that would help you here as the override is a site wide setting and really only useful for sites where an admin or similar user sends email to all of the other users.

There is a “debug” setting on the plugin settings page (Dashboard > Settings > Email Users) which when enabled, will display the email headers Email Users constructs instead of actually sending the email. One some hosts, it doesn’t matter what email address is set in the “From” or “Reply To” header, the server will change it after WordPress hands it off to the underlying server’s MTA. If that is happening on your site, there is nothing WordPress nor the Email Users plugin can do to fix it. In that case, you’d likely need an SMTP plugin which uses something like Gmail to send email through.

The email masking you describe is similar to what Craig’s List does. For the email to be set up such that the user can respond in their email, some sort of email relay needs to be set up to translate the email address the user replies to into something which then gets passed on to the real user. That is way out of scope of a WordPress plugin.

An alternative would be to build an Inbox system right into WordPress where the user can reply to messages. Because it is all in WordPress, WordPress manages to mapping of the reply to a specific user to an email to that users which basically tells the user to go login the web site to see the message. Similar to what Physicians do to account for HIPA laws. The users gets an email letting them know they have a message. To read the message requires the user to login into a web site. Again, this is a significant effort to build an way beyond the scope of Email Users.

Have you looked into BuddyPress? I think it does some of what you’re asking to do.

As for the rest of the things you’d like to do, it is also well beyond the scope of the plugin. You could probably author an adjacent plugin which builds on what Email Users does and adds the front end / custom dashboard capabilities you’re looking for. When you add the form processing and other capabilities which interact with a theme on the front end, it can and often does, create and endless set of questions and support issues. Why? Because every WordPress theme is different and many of them do all sorts of hacks and work-arounds or more frequently, employ some custom Javascript which plugins can’t possibly expect to account for.

I am not trying to say that what you want to do is an unreasonable request. It makes sense. However, from a support perspective, I try to steer clear of doing things on the front end. I have another plugin which does support front end integration and 90% (or more) of the questions are usually related to the interaction between the plugin and the theme. There are a lot of poorly coded themes floating around and many people don’t understand why a plugin “just doesn’t work with my theme” when a plugin doesn’t behave as they expect.

Yes, this is possible. The end user would use the capability on the Dashboard to “Send to User” or “Send to Group” just like an admin would. The visibility of other users can be controlled by the admin. By default users cannot send to other groups, only other users.

It isn’t possible to do what you would like to do. There are no shortcodes to enable frontend integration. All interaction with Email Users is through the Dashboard, even for non-admin users.

If the “test” isn’t working then that is a separate problem and should be sorted out first. If you’re not receiving the test message it is most likely that the email is being classified as spam or something else is interfering with the plugin.

Do you get other email messages from your WordPress site? The Email Users plugin is built on top of the wp_mail() WordPress API function so every message is passed through the same email mechanism which WordPress itself uses.

There is no way to add an unsubscribe link in the emails which are sent out. To could add some text to the footer which lets users know that to unsubscribe they need to login (and you could include your site’s login URL) and update their profile to stop receiving emails.

This leads to the second part of your question. There is already two checkboxes on the user profile page where a user can indicate they don’t want to receive certain types of email via Email Users. It is possible that this capability is disabled globally, you’ll have to check your site’s Email Users settings (Dashboard > Settings > Email Users).

Yes, this is possible. As I recall, the Fire Department / Police Department example also defined a Public Works group that checked two meta values. I am not somewhere where I can look at the example right now but that is what I recall.

The plugin doesn’t support a template and one would normally think about it. However, on the plugin settings page you can edit the default template and save it. If you send the same email daily this would be the easiest way to save your work.

The other option is to set up a draft post with the content stored in it and copy/paste it from the draft into the email.

Sorry for the delayed response to your question. I missed this while I was out of the country for work.

I am assuming your reference to “role’ is the WordPress definition of role from the WordPress roles and capabilities. If it is not, then the rest of this post probably doesn’t make any sense.

I don’t have an easy way to look at a WordPress database right now but I don’t think role is stored as user meta data which would explain why you’re not seeing results to the query. The Custom Meta filter is specifically written to use meta data from a user.

So how would you get around this? You could write a small plugin which runs periodically which processes all of the users in on your site and their roles and stores the value(s) as user meta data. The Email Users meta query would then work based on the field you define to store the role data.

There is a setting on the plugin setting page (Dashboard > Settings > Email Users) which allows you to set a “reply to” address which the plugin will then add as a reply to header.

If you want to do something more elaborate, there is a hook which allows you to manipulate the mail headers, it is called “mailusers_manipulate_headers” and there is a description of it, plus a couple other hooks on the plugin description page in WordPress plugin repository.

Sorry for the delayed response, I missed this when you posted it.

The situation you describe sounds like the page is incomplete. I suspect if you look a the source HTML for the page, at thew bottom you’ll see that the HTML end abruptly – no closing tags, no sections for the missing parts of the page.

What would cause this? Usually a PHP error of some sort. Do you have viability into error logs for your server? I suspect if you do, or if you can enable them temporarily, you’ll see a PHP error at some line number in some file.

If possible, it would be good to know the error and the file and line number it came from.