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Michael King
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July 27, 2022 at 1:21 pm
To start with, I don’t think (but I could be wrong) this is an EE4 problem, I’m just kind of looking for advice on where to start.
I just registered ~175 people for an event, and I’ve had an extraordinary number of people asking for duplicate confirmations because they didn’t get one. I can see the outbound confirmations in the Messages list, but I can’t tell if my server didn’t actually send them, or if my server has a spammy reputation and they were trapped along the way, or if they wound up in my customer’s junk folders (I’m asking some people about that last one) or if something else happened.
The whole Messages process seems pretty murky to me. Is there any way to see what is happening, or do I have any choice in an outbound mail server?
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Tony
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July 28, 2022 at 8:53 am
Hi Michael,
I can see the outbound confirmations in the Messages list
So you can see them in Event Espresso -> Messages -> Message activity, correct?
Do they have a green status bar (the colour bar to the left of each message)?
If so, then in short it means that the email generated within Event Espresso and was passed over to wp_mail() with no errors returned. wp_mail() does some additional checks and then sends the email however your server is set up to send them, so if you got a green status bar as far as EE is concerned the email sent without issue (normally wp_mail() returns either an error or just false if there’s an issue).
The whole Messages process seems pretty murky to me.
Welcome to email in general 🙂 it’s a finicky beast and EE has to site on top of it.
Is there any way to see what is happening, or do I have any choice in an outbound mail server?
In terms of seeing what is happening, yes, but not easily. Your host will have a mail server set up for your site to use but it’s mainly for convenience and will be shared by many sites. You would need to work with them to get more details on the emails and from what I’ve found the often seem to get fairly … defensive and just dismiss issues as it can’t possibly be due to the mail server.
In terms of choosing an outbound mail server, yes you can. Which service would you use? (I’m asking because there may be a plugin for it already or if custom you’ll need someone to set up your server to use it)
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Michael King
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August 3, 2022 at 12:30 pm
Hi Torry,
Sorry for the slow response – I wrote one but apparently failed to send it. You asked “In terms of choosing an outbound mail server, yes you can. Which service would you use? (I’m asking because there may be a plugin for it already or if custom you’ll need someone to set up your server to use it).”
We use Gsuite so I would like to use a Gmail server.
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Tony
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August 3, 2022 at 4:50 pm
So the way to do that is using something like WP Mail SMTP and they have a tutorial on this here:
https://wpmailsmtp.com/docs/how-to-set-up-the-gmail-mailer-in-wp-mail-smtp/
EE doesn’t handle any details of ‘how’ your site sends email, thats what wp_mail() is for, so the above plugin basically sets up wp_mail to send your emails via Gmail and EE passes the email over to wp_mail.
Is that what you are looking for?
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Michael King
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August 3, 2022 at 5:55 pm
Yes, that’s the hint I’m looking for. I see it in the repository, and looks like it’s wildly popular. I understand you guys just put messages in a queue, and they get sent by some rarely seen process inside the host. I will make a little science project with that plugin.
Thanks for the help! I think this will be way easier than trying to figure out exactly where messages are getting lost.
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Tony
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August 4, 2022 at 3:25 am
You’re most welcome 🙂
I’d be interested in whatever you find with this btw
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Michael King
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August 25, 2022 at 10:21 am
For the interested reader, here’s a summary of my experience into the murky world of email sending. Happy ending included.
My quest to figure out where my confirmations messages were getting lost led me to believe they were getting spam-filtered out before they ever got to my buyers, although there was no hard data for that theory. Tony here confirmed what I thought – EE4 just hands messages to wp-mail and WP sends them in the simplest way possible, unauthenticated, completely behind the curtain. Keep in mind that this used to work quite well for me, but this year, especially this month, success rate went through the floor. Next stop was my hosting company.
As my hosting company, DreamHost, explained to me when I asked why so few of my confirmation messages were reaching their destination, more and more service providers are rejecting email that is unauthenticated and only passing along authenticated message. Unfortunately the wp_mail function in WordPress only sends unauthenticated messages and my success rate for those lately is about 1 in 4. two months ago that was higher but not 100%, so I suspect some or many providers have just recently thrown the switch to the authenticated-only position. Again, I could find no data for that.
I found two suppliers with significant support in the space for forcing wp_mail to send authenticates messages to get a higher success. One is SMTP2GO and the other is WP Mail SMTP which claims 2+ million active installations. I had a little time to evaluate those two but not to do exhaustive testing, and no time for others. Both require installing a plugin, adding records to the site DNS, and creating an account with the service.
Basically my needs are to send EE4 messages using our Gsuite account for the small non-profit where I am the one-man unpaid IT department witht has no budget for a paid service. In a good month, there would be a few hundred messages. Both plugins offer free accounts which meet my modest needs, but WP Mail SMTP is more generous.
SMTP2Go was highly recommended by the WordPress community in Reddit, so I started there. They have a very slick guided installation document, and require 3 new DNS records. None of that was too hard. After updating the DNS they have a function to verify the additions – nice – and a test message sending function in the plugin which worked on the first try – YAY. Unfortunately when sending messages from EE4, they never arrived – oh dear. To be fair, they told me up front that Gmail was a more difficult setup than other options and maybe I missed a step. I didn’t have time for a bunch of troubleshooting and there were no apparent error messages, so I uninstalled this, took out the new DNS records, and moved on.
WP Mail SMTP, which is recommended by my DreamHost hosting company, also had a guided installation document that looked pretty simple until I realized there was one line which said “Go to your Gsuite account and set up the API.” In the usual Google back end fashion, that was not for the faint of heart, but their instructions were good. There was not the nice verification step that SMTP2Go has. I installed the plugin, added one SPF DNS record and sent a successful test message- YAY. I kind of lost track of time, but I think that took a couple of hours of work to set up. So I queued up some EE4 messages and bingo, all arrived in any of my accounts – double YAY! I later added a DKIM DNS record for enhanced protection, and I should add a DMARC record, but not right now. I have since banged this pretty hard while tuning up my confirmation messages, and I think I never lost a message. Seems to take about 10 minutes for an event detail message to reach my inbox, which is fine for me; payment confirmations appear almost instantly. I don’t really know what those times were before.
In conclusion, WP Mail SMTP was more work to set up although neither one was easy. So far WP Mail SMTP works flawlessly, and SMTP2GO didn’t work for me. To be fair, SMTP2GO has relationships with 3 email senders which are reportedly easier to work with than Gsuite, but I didn’t want yet another vendor/account that can go bad, so that wasn’t what I wanted.
Final score – WP Mail SMTP 1; SMTP2GO nil.
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Tony
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August 26, 2022 at 6:30 am
Hi Michael,
I know we’ve discussed this a little over email, but just wanted to say thank you for also posting your findings here for others to read.
I’m glad you have a working solution 🙂
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