Configure Email Gateway Parameter Information

Good Morning,

I have serveral sites, including a WP “development site/environment,” on Host B. I developed a WP site for a client on my dev site, and here is what has transpired as we went “live” with the site:

1. I created/recreated the WP site for my client on Host A (a friend of my client’s.) Host A installed/configured WordPress for me/us, and everything looked great.

2. On my development site, I added in and configured an e-commerce plugin, worked out the kinks/bugs, and again, everything ultimately looked and worked great.

3. I then added/configured the e-commerce plugin to my client’s live site. Unfortunately, we determined that Host A was not robust enough to handle the e-commerce plugin, so we opted to move hosting to Host B (same host as I use.) We removed the e-commerce plugin so that the live site would remain active.

4. Host A created backups of all database and site files for use when migrating the site to Host B.

4. The support staff at Host B migrated the site to Host B, and after some minor tweaking, the basic site was again up and running.

5. I then created and launched e-commerce on the site. Everything seemed to work well, except no notification email messages were being sent (e.g., order confirmation, new user welcome, etc.)

6. After consulting with the developer of the plugin, they felt there was an issue on the backend with email configuration. Although my dev site and the client’s live site are both hosted by Host B, they ARE on different servers, so the plugin developer felt email configuration for the two different servers may be the root cause.

This morning, the lightbulb over my head went ON and I realized that the email configuration issue does not lie at the server level, but rather at the initial WP config level. I went into the database for my client and realized that, when Host A installed and configured WP initially, none of the email gateway parameters had been set. SO the mailserver_url, mailserver_user, and mailserver_pass parameter values in the wp_options table were still configured with their default values.

I updated these three parameters to be their correct values (I left mailserver_port set to its default value, 110,) and tested operation – notification emails are still not being sent. I suspect this may be due to the fact that the outgoing mail server on Host B requires authentication, but since I am currently unable to access the database using phpMyAdmin (they apparently block it or the port it uses here at work,) I can’t go in and poke around to see if there is another parameter that I missed.

SO – I thought I would ask here to see if someone can save me a bit of time later and point me to any other parameters/tables that I will need to update… including anything that specifies using authentication on the outgoing mail server…

Thanks in advance!
Nancy