Do you mean the admin is only receiving copies of the confirmation emails for roughly half the signups? Or the people signing up are not receiving the confirmation emails?
The plugin calls the wp_mail function to actually send the emails, which is WordPress’ built-in mail function. It’s the same function that sends out new user registration emails. It’s basically using the PHP mail system. Some free email accounts like to block emails from these type of server email systems since it sends out email as php user “nobody”, unless your server has been specifically configured to send those emails out using your server hosting account user email.
I have also found, through working with some custom plugins for other sites, that some servers are very finicky when it comes to how CC or BCC emails are presented when using the PHP mail function. Even though my plugin formats them the way that WordPress says to do it in the codex for the wp_mail function, I have found that on some servers I could not get mail to send when using BCC email addresses. For one particular site I had to rewrite the mail function to send to all the people on their list one email at a time just using the “to” email address, as opposed to sending one email with “to” going to admin and the rest of the list of recipients in the BCC field.
A better solution that we use for our own PTA web site is to install a SMTP mail plugin, which will hook into the WordPress PHP mailer and send mail via a SMTP account instead. We found that many more emails get delivered when using SMTP, and that seemed to work for us without having to eliminate the BCC emails. If you have some emails for the sheet chairs, as well as a global CC email set in the options, all those get sent as BCC emails with the way the plugin is currently written.
You can search for SMTP plugins and see if they work better for you. I like this one:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-wp-smtp/
Also see this for more detail about what I said above:
http://www.butlerblog.com/2013/09/24/troubleshooting-the-wp_mail-function/
and, also note that my plugin sets a from header in all the emails it generates, so that part of the above article is not a concern.
Looks like there is also a newer, and even better, SMTP mail plugin for WordPress:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/postman-smtp/
@jason,
My plugin has an option where you can set what the From address is. It’s not a contact form, so it doesn’t try to set the from address to the visitor address. It only sends signup confirmations and reminder emails, and those all come from whatever address is entered in the plugin options (defaults to admin email if nothing entered in the plugin option).
Also @jason,
Just switched all my own sites over to your Postman plugin from Easy WP SMTP… super easy to setup with my business GMail account and OAuth!
Those all come from whatever address is entered in the plugin options (defaults to admin email if nothing entered in the plugin option).
If the From address is not valid for the SMTP server being connected to, then that’s a problem. With the default wp_mail, many servers (ie. Gmail, Yahoo) will fail with an invalid from address. My plugin handles this situation by setting an appropriate Envelope From (as opposed to Message From).
super easy to setup with my business GMail account and OAuth!
sweet!
I’m not surprised that it’s GoDaddy. This is the 4th or 5th client I’ve had recently who had an issue with sending emails from forms.
@jason – I tried your plugin a few months ago on a site, but no luck. I just tried on my current site and can’t send the test email. Do I need the client’s email password to be able to do this?
Thanks-
I’m going to mark this as resolved, since this is not really an issue with my plugin.
@jason: Also, a note on the test mails after setting up Postman. If I gave the plugin my Comcast email address, the test mail never showed up at Comcast (using my Gmail SMTP as the sender with Postman). But, the info showed it was successful in your plugin. Testing contact forms on all the sites, and everything worked just fine that way. Probably just a comcast issue.
This is the 4th or 5th client I’ve had recently who had an issue with sending emails from forms.
GoDaddy only allows connections to their own SMTP relay, or localhost and normally anything on port 443. This limits how you can use their service, but I haven’t come across a website that couldn’t be configured for GoDaddy.
If you use GoDaddy SMTP services, you must use a GoDaddy managed email. You can’t for example, send a message from your Yahoo address through GoDaddy.
Do I need the client’s email password to be able to do this?
For a GoDaddy site: If you use relay-hosting.secureserver.net – yes. If you use localhost – no. If you use the Gmail API – yes.
the test mail never showed up at Comcast (using my Gmail
Again, my first advice is double check your SPF (there’s an SPF pass/fail in every Gmail header). If SPF is fine, then likely it’s an internal blacklist involving your subnet.
