Digest: Not sending emails

[John]

Hello. I have a forum with over 3000 members and the digests don’t seem to be sending out. I just installed the plugin last week so I thought I’d let it run for a while. I’ve verified that the right user groups are selected as well. Is there a log or anything else I can check?

Thanks

[vinny]

Hi John,

Have you looked through the documentation? It explains how to test it and see if it’s scheduled to run. It also explains how to set up better cron jobs and not rely on wp-cron.

Cheers,
Vinny

[John]

Hi Vinny,
Thanks for sending this along. I’ve verified everything in there and I’m still having issues. Other cron jobs seems to be working ok. Just not these ones. Thanks in advance.

[vinny]

John,

A few questions:

1. Did you install the Advanced Cron Manager plugin to see that the cron jobs were created?
2. Can you also look in your database to see if there are any rows in your digest queue table?

Please create an admin account for me to have a look at your settings.

[John]

This reply has been marked as private.

[vinny]

Hi John,

I suspect the script is timing out in the background. Another client also has the same problem (she gets 150 messages out from a pool of 450 accounts).

I’m investigating a fix, and will have it out asap.

[Patrice]

I am just catching up to this topic. I may have an idea about why this is happening. I’ve been an owner of an lsoft email forum for many years. Many of the owners and moderators of these lists starting having trouble with multiple subscribers failing to notice the forum digests were going to their spam boxes. The many isp’s saw this glut of mail from one sender and thought it was spam, blocking that mail off their servers. Thus hundreds of folks with AOL or comcast addresses for instance would not get their mail and think that the moderator was blocking them.

Try asking your subscribers to white list your digest email, even one person accidentally marking your digests as spam on a common isp can cause all mail to be blocked to everyone on the same isp. If you have a way to get error reports about sent mail, check into this to see if some isps are blocking the mail.

[John]

Thanks Patrice! In this case we’re using a relay service called DNSExit. I’m not seeing the full number of emails even making it that far which points to the webserver not sending out the full amount.

Vinny: If your other client is having issues with 450 emails, what would the time out need to be set for 3000? Have you had members with that many before…?

Thanks.

[vinny]

Thanks Patrice!

John, I honestly don’t know – I can’t (and don’t want to) keep track of the number of subscribers. I only know about those who told me like you and the other client.

I’m still investigating if this will work, but my idea is to have something like the snippet below in the plugin.

if ( defined('DOING_CRON') && DOING_CRON )
{
    set_time_limit(0);
    ignore_user_abort(1);
}

But I’ll only be able to test it tonight or later this week.

[Patrice]

John,
Well it was a thought.

When I first starting using this digest plugin, Bluehost thought I was sending spam from my server, which is a no no for hosting. They were blocking all outgoing mail, ALL OF IT, from my blog. That included all the bbPress notifications. It took days to figure this all out. I had to fill out a form that required me to list the names of all the moderators getting notifications and attest that I had permission from them to send them these bulk notifications. What a mess. They treated this like a very serious violation and were about to lock out my account.

We help owners care for very sick dogs and even missing a few notifications can mean a dog might die without our help. It was very stressful.

Hope you figure this out. Tell me more about DNSExit. Would this be something I can use with my shared server on Bluehost?

[vinny]

John,

For the client who was having trouble with 492 mailouts, I never really got to see if it was timing out or not (I did not have access to her error logs to check on the cron job), but I did add the set_time_limit(0) piece and some debugging to see if it was completing the recipient mailout loop.

It was. She was using gmail for SMTP with WP-Mail-SMTP plugin, and her sent items only showed around 150. I switched it to Mailgun for testing, hardcoded a test address in bbpress-notify-nospam, and it worked. Mind you, this was for regular notifications, not the Digest, but the fix should be the same.

I’m completing some additions for the Digest plugin and will add the time limit code to it. I haven’t used DNSExit, so I don’t know if it shows you the number of mailouts, but I recommend that you check it for dropped messages.

Cheers,
Vinny

[vinny]

Version 1.4.2 has the set_time_limit(0) code change. Please update and let me know if it’s working.

[Trisha]

Vinny – for some reason, after months of the digest email sending properly, it has now stopped. The last digests were sent out on August 16th – more than one week ago.

I have them set up on three different email addresses. As reported months ago, I almost never receive them at all on two of those email addresses. But I have had one outlook.com email address where I have received the consistently – but they are no longer being delivered.

To test it, I have commented in the forum and waited two days – but no delivery. I have also tested my wp-smtp, but it sends email with no problem.

I tried to understand in the documentation about chron jobs – but that’s too far over my head.

How can I get digest email to deliver again?

[vinny]

Hi Trisha,

Can you create an admin account for me so I can have a look at your settings? I’ll probably also have to install a plugin to help me query your database.

Please provide the account names that you’re expecting messages at (make sure you mark the message as a private reply at the bottom of the editor so only I can see it).

Cheers,
Vinny

[Patrice]

Trisha,
Read my post above from April 26th. All my notifications stopped abruptly and I finally found out it was Bluehost putting all my outgoing mail into a spam folder. Check with your ISP provider to see if they are blocking your notifications as spam. They can see bulk emails as suspect.

[Author]

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