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Espresso not sending out confirmation emails

Posted: February 1, 2013 at 6:23 am


Joseph Merignac

February 1, 2013 at 6:23 am

Can someone help me figure out why Espresso is not sending out confirmation emails? I have checked all the settings I know, and nothing obvious seems to be wrong. Is there something I might have missed?


Jonathan Wilson

February 1, 2013 at 1:53 pm

Hi Chris,

Check the Event Espresso > General Settings > Email Settings. You may have it set to send emails after payment is received.

Also, your server may need to authenticate the emails before sending. I would recommend installing an SMTP plugin and providing the proper credentials or using a Gmail account in the SMTP account settings.


Joseph Merignac

February 1, 2013 at 1:56 pm

I have the following settings marked:

Send payment confirmation emails? Yes

Send registration confirmation emails before payment is received? Yes

Use fancy email headers? No

Is that right?

As for an SMTP plugin, can you recommend one? I am not familiar with such a plugin.


Evan Dixon

February 1, 2013 at 2:19 pm

I am having a problem with this today after running an update.

I have tested using the WP SMTP plugin and WordPress is sending emails with no issue.

I’ve enabled confirmation emails, toggled using fancy headers, tried registering and waiting for confirmation, mailing attendees function, resending confirmation function, even set up a dummy event with only name and email to test. Nothing is working.

Not surehow to remedy this.


Evan Dixon

February 1, 2013 at 2:37 pm

When I “Send Message to Attendees” I get a cinfirmation at the top of the page that says “Email Sent to 1 person successfully.36”

Not sure what the .36 is?


Joseph Merignac

February 1, 2013 at 3:07 pm

Yes, I just ran the update as well. and it was working prior to the update.


Rich O

February 1, 2013 at 3:55 pm

i am also having problem with the email confirmation. what i did was, i added an image to the email confirmation, after adding the image, i tried to register myself hoping that i will receive the confirmation email that i have created. the email confirmation doesn’t work properly. Kindly help us create an email confirmation with an image. Thanks


Dean

February 2, 2013 at 4:44 am

Hi guys,

Regarding the emails, we have not come across any issues with emails not going out after 3.1.30. I have been testing this on my live test server and have received all emails.

Has everyone checked spam folders?

@evan – can you link your site please? I would like to test registrations and see if I receive anything.

@chris – can you set up a free event I can test please? Or set an event to send emails before payment received.

Not sure what the .36 is?

Me either, but it shouldn’t be there, I have raised a ticket for the devs to get that removed.

Kindly help us create an email confirmation with an image.

Images can be added to emails. Is it just because the email you received doesn’t contain a viewable image? If so have you allowed images in your email client? It is standard practice for email clients to hide images unless allowed to show them by the user. We have no control over that.


Evan Dixon

February 2, 2013 at 6:16 am

Checked spam, tested about 5 different email addresses (self-hosted, gmail, man, bellsouth/AT&T, etc). Don’t think they’re going out at all.

Here’s my dummy event:
http://www.ejcarolinas.com/?page_id=209&ee=9

Thanks for helping.


Joseph Merignac

February 2, 2013 at 9:03 am

I just tried it again and no email. You can do it here on this page: http://tristateselfdefense.com/wordpress1/event-registration/
Just go down to the May 4 event and register under your name. Choose to pay by check and then I’ll just go in and delete your name in a day or two.


Joseph Merignac

February 2, 2013 at 9:07 am

@evan I just tried your event and I got an email. (registered as Barack Obama)


Seth Shoultes

  • Support Staff

February 2, 2013 at 9:57 am

Chris,

I just tried that event and nothing came through. Can you try to send me the email using the resend email button in the attendee overview?


Evan Dixon

February 2, 2013 at 10:03 am

Yep, reset my license key, deactivated and deactivated the plugin, and the fried again and it’s apparently now working. Not really sure what caused it to work. Now emails are going to spam for my gmail, unfortunately, so that’s next on the list to resolve.

Wish it was clearer how I resolved it so i could share with guys, but unfortunately it’s not. Best of luck to you all.


Evan Dixon

February 2, 2013 at 10:04 am

Deactivated and reactivated*


ndaniel

February 2, 2013 at 11:41 am

Evan,
The EE team had recommended the Postmark mail service to me. When we started using the Postmark service, our spam problems were solved.
I recommend spending a few bucks on it.

Cheers,
Bill


Seth Shoultes

  • Support Staff

February 2, 2013 at 11:57 am

Thanks Bill. We were having problems sending emails from our server as well and Postmark really helped. We just found a new service called Mandrill, by Mailchimp, that we are going to be moving to sometime next week. Mandrill has much better delivery analytics and tracking than Postmark and is priced much lower than Postmark.

We also released a plugin for Postmark in our pre-release download page: https://eventespresso.com/support/documentation/pre-release-downloads/

We will be releasing a Mandrill plugin very soon as well.


Joseph Merignac

February 2, 2013 at 3:30 pm

Ok…Seth, I resent you your registration details.


Seth Shoultes

  • Support Staff

February 2, 2013 at 3:45 pm

I didn’t get anything at all. That function uses the standard wp_mail() to send the email. So it sounds like something outside of Event Espresso and WP is blocking outgoing emails. I would recommend using an SMTP plugin, Postmark, Mandrill, or talking to your hosting provider to see if something else is going on.


Joseph Merignac

February 4, 2013 at 9:03 am

Seth, it has to be something with Espresso since the contact form works fine. I submitted an inquiry via the contact form and the email came right thru. But no emails get sent out from Espresso.


Seth Shoultes

  • Support Staff

February 4, 2013 at 9:37 am

Maybe the contact form you are using is overriding or conflicting with the wp_mail function? What contact form plugin are you using? Or is the contact form built into the theme?

Like I said before, Event Espresso uses built-in WP methods for sending email. If something is overriding those methods, then it may cause the wp_mail() function and Event Espresso to not work properly.


Joseph Merignac

February 4, 2013 at 9:56 am

The contact form is built into the theme. I am using this: http://www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/nova/

Here are my activated plugins:

  1. Spam Free WordPress
  2. Google XML Sitemaps
  3. Shortcodes Ultimate

Are any of those a problem?


Joseph Merignac

February 4, 2013 at 9:58 am

Ok…I deactivated Spam Free WordPress and Google XML Sitemaps with no success.


Seth Shoultes

  • Support Staff

February 4, 2013 at 11:19 am

I am pretty sure that emails sent from Event Espresso are working, or else we would have a lot more people telling us otherwise. Myself and the support team test the email (and other) functionality on a daily basis.

Have you considered switching the the 2011 or 2012 theme to see what happens? Over the years of supporting this plugin, we have seen plugin and theme developers doing some pretty crazy things. Including overriding core WordPress functions. When that happens things tend to break.


Joseph Merignac

February 4, 2013 at 11:49 am

Ok…I am not trying to be pesky here, and I do greatly appreciate your help. But let me just say….the only thing that changed on my site during this time was the update to the Events Espresso plugin. After the update, the emails seemed to stop working Nothing else has changed on this site, and the emails were working just fine.

At any rate, I am opening a ticket with the theme developer. I’ll let you know how that goes.


Seth Shoultes

  • Support Staff

February 4, 2013 at 11:52 am

You could try searching the theme, for the wp_mail() function, to see if there are any functions/actions/filters that are overriding that function.


Seth Shoultes

  • Support Staff

February 4, 2013 at 12:00 pm

I don’t think anything has changed on our side, as far as the emails are concerned. I would recommend trying the Postmark addon that we created to see if that helps. You can also get a display of all the errors that are happening when it runs, which might be useful for debugging this issue. Another option would be to turn on debugging in Event Espresso and your wp-config.php file to see if there is anything happening behind the scenes that may be causing issues.

This is what I use for my debugging settings in the wp-config (be sure to replace define('WP_DEBUG', 1); with the following code):

ini_set('display_errors', 'On');
error_reporting(-1);
define('WP_DEBUG', 1);
define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', 1 );
define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', 1 );  //  TRUE    FALSE

The debug log, if enabled, will create a debug.log file in your wp-content directory.


Joseph Merignac

February 4, 2013 at 4:50 pm

Ok…I got the Postmark addon installed. I setup a server at Postmark, entered the API key, and sent off a test email. I got an error log about six miles long. I put it inside a google doc for easy reading. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Lm2wm18wnpvZkFHdDQPnEWjmyq1uxUSWQ1MgdMgYkXc/edit?usp=sharing


Seth Shoultes

  • Support Staff

February 4, 2013 at 5:03 pm

Chris it looks like you need to set up the postmark plugin settings.


Joseph Merignac

February 4, 2013 at 5:09 pm

Well in WordPress, I entered the API key, put in my name and email, and saved it. In Postmark, I setup a server. Is there anything else I need to do?


Seth Shoultes

  • Support Staff

February 4, 2013 at 5:46 pm

These are the two main errors I am seeing:

Date Feb 04, 2013 11:42PM

Message Sender signature not defined for From address

Date Feb 04, 2013 11:41PM

Message Reply To address “” is invalid


Joseph Merignac

February 5, 2013 at 2:52 pm

Ok….I’ve made some progress. I did finally get a test email to go out via Postmark. But after the email is successfully sent, I get this error msg at the top of the screen:

Warning: extract() expects parameter 1 to be array, string given in /data/23/2/45/51/2208051/user/2425268/htdocs/wordpress1/wp-content/plugins/postmark/classes/EE_PM_Init.controller.php on line 172

any idea what that might mean?


Joseph Merignac

February 5, 2013 at 2:57 pm

and at the bottom of the payment page, I get this msg: screenshot here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Lm2wm18wnpvZkFHdDQPnEWjmyq1uxUSWQ1MgdMgYkXc/edit?usp=sharing


Joseph Merignac

February 5, 2013 at 2:59 pm

I also tried changing the theme. I activated a different theme and still no emails get out. In light of the fact that I was able to get an email out via Postmark and changing the theme didn’t help, it seems like it has to be the Espresso plugin.


Josh

  • Support Staff

February 6, 2013 at 12:29 pm

Hi there,

There are many factors here that can come into play when the email hook is supposed to fire. If one thing is off, the code that fires off the email will not execute (this is by design, as we shouldn’t be sending out payment notifications if someone hasn’t paid for example)

Can you check the email settings in Event Espresso>General settings and let us know what they’re set to?

Also, what is the default payment status set to on the General settings page?

Which payment gateway(s) are you using?

Are there any template or gateway files from a prior version in either /wp-content/uploads/espresso/templates or /wp-content/uploads/espresso/gateways.

If you have any add-ons installed, are these the very latest version numbers?


Joseph Merignac

February 6, 2013 at 2:53 pm

-Can you check the email settings in Event Espresso>General settings and let us know what they’re set to?

Send payment confirmation emails? Yes

Send registration confirmation emails before payment is received? Yes
Use fancy email headers? No

then the two templates

-Also, what is the default payment status set to on the General settings page?
incomplete

-Which payment gateway(s) are you using?

paypal and check/money order

-Are there any template or gateway files from a prior version in either /wp-content/uploads/espresso/templates or /wp-content/uploads/espresso/gateways.

both folders are empty

If you have any add-ons installed, are these the very latest version numbers?
only couple of the standard add-ons, all up-to-date, and we tried disabling them all.

please note that this problem probably occurred after an update, we don’t know which one exactly but we noticed it around the end of Jan


Josh

  • Support Staff

February 6, 2013 at 3:54 pm

Thanks for checking. Can you send emails manually via the admin (by clicking on the little envelope icon?)

What plugins are installed on this site?

Have you checked in the spam folder for Registration confirmations?


Seth Shoultes

  • Support Staff

February 6, 2013 at 4:19 pm

Chris I got this back from our developer:

the error is pointing to a line which is extracting what should be an array after apply_filters(‘wp_mail’); There could be a plugin that is hooking into wp_mail and not returning an array (to, subject, message, headers, attachments). So if the user has any other plugins that are using the wp_mail hook then that would be the first suspect.


Joseph Merignac

February 7, 2013 at 9:34 am

Hi,

thanks for your reply,
we had some plugins but they are all disabled now, the problem still exists.

the plugins are
1) Akismt (Disabled)
2) Event Esprresso (Enabled)
3) Event Espresso calender (Enabled)
4) Google analytics (Disabled)
5) Google xml site map (Disabled)
6) post mark (Disabled)
7) short code ultimate (Disabled)
8) spam free wordpress (Disabled)
9) wordpress super cahs (Disabled)

when I enable the post mark plugin, I can send manual emails, but it is now disabled. I didn’t try anything else (where I can find this envilop icon?)

nothing on the spam folder


Joseph Merignac

February 8, 2013 at 6:36 am

Any updates?


Josh

  • Support Staff

February 8, 2013 at 8:32 am

Hi Chris,

The envelope icon button is in a column under “Actions” on the right hand side of the screen when you are viewing attendee reports. There’s a screenshot in the documentation:

https://eventespresso.com/wiki/attendee-reports/

If you try sending out an email manually and it works, that will help narrow down the problem. I would suggest creating an attendee record with your email address so it sends to you. If you do not get the manually email, please also check your spam folder.


Joseph Merignac

February 8, 2013 at 9:48 am

Hi Josh,

    Tried that, but I didn't get any emails. checked the spam folder as well, still nothing.

thanks


Josh

  • Support Staff

February 8, 2013 at 11:28 am

Hi Chris,

I saw that you sent us log in creds, so I thought I’d log in and take a look.

It turns out that the problem was caused by having two email addresses in the “Primary contact email” field on the Event Espresso>General Settings page.

This will cause the “Reply to:” address to be invalid and the emails will fail to send out.

I removed one of the email addresses and tested the emails and they’re working as expected.

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