Speakup! intermittently stops sending emails

  • Resolved Committee

    (@committee)


    10 years, 2 months ago

    I’ve created a page using the Speakup! plugin to send emails to our local elected officials as part of a library campaign:
    http://www.savenypl.org/email-the-mayor/

    The page went live yesterday afternoon and initially worked fine. However, approximately 4 hours later (and after about 170 emails were sent) at 6:30pm, the site stopped sending out emails. It continued to collect email signatures and contact info; it’s just that no new emails were actually sent out (I know this because one of the cc’s on the email was to one of my own email addresses so that I could collect copies of the sent messages).

    Around 10:30 pm EST I noticed what was happening and contacted tech support for my web host (Go Daddy). The tech person confirmed that the message were not getting caught by any spam filter, and could find nothing wrong with the site. He claimed that he had made no changes, but while he was talking the speakup page suddenly started sending out new emails. (These were new emails created as people were filling out the form in real time; the approximately 100 messages which people had sent between 6:30pm and 10:30 pm never appeared.)

    Everything then worked fine until 12:25 this afternoon, when the exact same problem recurred. At this point the webpage had sent out roughly 250 new emails since last night’s outage. The web page is continuing to record new signatures and contact info as people sign the form, but no emails are going out. I called GoDaddy tech support, and this person stated that he thought that the problem was that I was hitting the 1000 daily relay limit that they impose (he said I had used 994). He further said that each cc on the email uses up one relay – and my email has 6 cc’s. He could not offer any work-around for this problem.

    This diagnosis seems unlikely to me – it doesn’t explain why I had the problem yesterday after 160 emails were sent out, and in particular it seems unlikely because I can’t find any indication elsewhere on the web that anyone else has ever experienced any problems with speakup being incapacitated by a relay limit on the host server.

    Can anyone help? I’ve put a great deal of effort into setting up this campaign, and right now it’s going down the tubes because the site isn’t functioning! I’m using version 2.4.2 of Speakup!, and version 3.8.1 of WordPress.

    Thanks in advance for any help!

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/speakup-email-petitions/

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  • Thread Starter Committee

    (@committee)

    10 years, 2 months ago

    In case anyone finds this thread while attempting to resolve a similar problem, here’s what happened: the problem WAS in fact that I was hitting the relay limit on my hosting site. GoDaddy’s 1000 relays per day limit meant that I could only send out 165 emails with 6 cc’s per day. After I hit this limit, the SpeakUp! plugin continued to correctly log the contact information for everyone who signed up to send an email, but no emails were actually sent out. There were no warning messages of any kind stating that this was happening; the only reason I knew there was a problem was because I had included my own email address amongst the cc’s on the email, and the messages stopped showing up in my mail box after the limit had been hit.

    The solution was to migrate my website to another host that offered a significantly higher relay limit. There really should be something about this issue in the SpeakUp! documentation – many cheap webhosting plans have 1000 relay/day limits, and it is something that people should check before launching an email campaign. Also, ALWAYS include a test address as a cc on your email so that you can check that messages are actually being sent!

    One final issue: there was apparently something odd about the headers of the email being sent out by SpeakUp! in its default configuration that was causing some servers to intermittently reject emails. The solution was to install the WP-Mail-SMTP plugin, and set it to send mail via SMTP. This is mentioned in the SpeakUp! FAQ as a solution if confirmation emails fail to go through, but it is apparently is necessary for the reliable sending of the actual emails to the targeted elected officials as well.

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