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Brandon Mart
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March 15, 2013 at 5:27 pm
First off, thank you for the great work. EE has been rather painless up until this point. I’m using EE 3.1.30.7P on WP 3.5.1. I have my website all set up, everything is working, and I’m ready to start marketing. However, anytime I register for a paid event I get multiple payment and registration email confirmations (~10 of each within 10 minutes), all being duplicates of the first email confirmations. That’s ~20 duplicate emails per registration! This only occurs with paid events (using PayPal IPN), while free events only send a single email confirmation. I have tested with the PayPal sandbox, as well as an actual $1.00 transaction, and it happens for both. The only plugins I have activated are Event Espresso plugins. I thought it was PayPal’s confirmation screen repeatedly sending the notice to EE, but the error occurs even if I log out of PayPal immediately following the transaction. I have reviewed all similar threads and exhausted all troubleshooting options, and don’t know where else to look. Please help me. I can PM a URL if needed.
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Josh
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March 18, 2013 at 12:03 pm
Hi Brandon,
Can you try using a service like Mandrill or Postmark app to deliver the transactional emails? We have a free WP plugin that you can download from the pre-release channel section of your account page (you may need to opt-on to the pre-releases by checking the box below the regular releases). You could also try sending out the email through a gmail account by using the WP Mail SMTP plugin.
With the paid event, you might also check and make sure that there is only one ( or none ) email addresses in the event’s option where you can enter alternate admin email addresses.
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Brandon Mart
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March 18, 2013 at 1:30 pm
Hey Josh,
Thanks for the reply. I’m a bit confused with your response. Are you saying that this is normal behavior for EE confirmation emails and I need to use a third-party plugin in order to work around it?
As for the admin email address, that is true that I can omit confirmation emails to the admin, but the customer still receives multiple emails.
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Josh
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March 18, 2013 at 2:46 pm
Hi Brandon,
I am not saying that this is normal behavior for Event Espresso confirmation emails. We do not see this when we test Event Espresso, and the majority of our customers do not experience this.
The work-around that I am suggesting will bypass your hosting company’s email server and preferably use a transactional email service that is designed to send out transactional email.
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Brandon Mart
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March 18, 2013 at 2:49 pm
I would prefer to troubleshoot the problem, and avoid paying more for a service that EE already provides. Is this possible?
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Josh
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March 18, 2013 at 2:57 pm
Hi Brandon,
I think you’re not understanding the work around that I’m suggesting. Also, Event Espresso does not provide an email service. We only provide support for our software, not the software on your host’s mail server. The email service is a built-in function of your host’s email server.
Part of troubleshooting this is trying another email delivery method. The outcome of those tests will help narrow down the issue. You will not need to pay anything to try any of the three options I mentioned above.
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Brandon Mart
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March 18, 2013 at 3:06 pm
I will try your recommended plugins and report my findings here. Please leave this thread open so I may continue to add to the discussion. Thank you for your help, Josh.
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Chris Reynolds
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March 18, 2013 at 3:14 pm
Email problems are almost uniformly issues with your hosting provider or email service. Mandrill, Postmark and Gmail are all email providers that we have direct experience with and can confirm that this issue never occurs. The reliability of email services from hosted solutions (particularly when it comes to shared server environments) varies wildly, and troubleshooting the problem would inevitably lead to your hosting environment, something which we have no control over, whereas with something like Mandrill and Postmark, you can specifically see how each individual email was handled. I fully understand if this is not a worthwhile investment for your business (although Mandrill is free for up to 12,000 emails per month), in which case WP Mail SMTP might be a better solution to try.
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Brandon Mart
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March 18, 2013 at 3:50 pm
Thank you, Chris. Your input pushed me toward Mandrill, as 12,000/mo is more than enough.
I have successfully sent test emails through the EE Mandrill plugin, but PayPal emails are still routing through the hosting account. Can you direct me toward documentation on how to route through Mandrill?
Apologies for my ignorance, I’ve never used a third party email handler through WP before.
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Josh
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March 18, 2013 at 4:08 pm
Hi Brandon,
The documentation can be found here:
https://eventespresso.com/wiki/postmark-app-mandrill-transactional-email-handling-services/
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Brandon Mart
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March 18, 2013 at 4:18 pm
It seems it’s just a matter of activating the plugin, putting in the api key and correct info, and it just working. I have done all these things, and successfully received Mandrill routed emails through the testing area of the plugin, but event confirmation emails (both free and PayPal) are still routing through the host. What am I missing?
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Brandon Mart
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March 18, 2013 at 5:01 pm
So I deactivated the EE Mandrill plugin and installed the Mandrill WP plugin. It is now successfully routing emails through Mandrill, but it is still sending ~10 emails over the course of 30 minutes. This is the same problem I was originally having. What should I try next?
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Josh
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March 19, 2013 at 7:25 am
Hi Brandon,
Can you try sending to a different email address and/or use a a different email client to check the email? This will help narrow down the issue.
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Brandon Mart
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March 19, 2013 at 10:49 am
Ok. I did as you asked. I tried different email addresses (and clients) through the PayPal system and through sign-up on the website. ~10 emails still send to all PayPal sign-ups, regardless of email address or receiving client. The emails are sent to the email address that is used during sign-up for the event (before payment). No emails are sent to the attendees PayPal email address.
I installed a WP Email logger to track outbound emails from WP and hopefully narrow down the source. Here is a PNG screenshot of the log from this morning. ID 24-41 are from a single sign-up using PayPal, and all logged outgoing were received in the client’s inbox. That’s 18 emails in about 40 minutes, and then it just stops. The problem is still isolated to PayPal-paid events; free events send only one confirmation email.
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Josh
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March 19, 2013 at 1:44 pm
Hi Brandon,
The email log actually helps a lot. With each registration confirmation being sent, there is also an IPN gateway variable dump being sent. This indicates that PayPal is sending the instant payment notification to your site repeatedly. You might find duplicate IPN entries in the PayPal IPN log file located in /wp-content/uploads/espresso/logs. There may be a communication issue between your site and PayPal’s servers. Here’s a related topic discussion at stackexchange:
http://stackoverflow.com/a/9417457
In your case, you probably haven’t changed the DNS, but there could be a delay in the response from your server to PayPal after the IPN is received. This can be sped up by installing a simplified transactions page template which can be downloaded here:
https://eventespresso.com/wiki/how-to-set-up-paypal-ipn/#incomplete
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Brandon Mart
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March 19, 2013 at 3:32 pm
I want to thank Josh and Chris for your help, time, and effort, for it was you who steered me in the right direction. Josh, the stack overflow article had the exact same symptoms I did, as you can see in the email log. That got me prodding around the log files and settings.
It turns out that the root of the problem was the PayPal IPN settings within EE. I had it forcing HTTPS on return URL (via the checkbox in the EE payment settings), which was either timing out or unable to carry out the request. I unchecked that box and now PayPal is only sending a single email for the receipt of purchase and reservation each.
Thanks again, boys. RESOLVED.
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Josh
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March 19, 2013 at 4:17 pm
Hi Brandon,
Glad to hear that changing the Force https setting was all that was needed. If you install an SSL certificate for the web site’s domain, the Force https setting can be then used. This helps get rid of the “you are about to go to an insecure page” warning message that some browsers will display when people return to your site from paying at PayPal.com.
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