Moderator
James Huff
(@macmanx)
Volunteer Moderator
WordPress does not have a built-in contact form. It sounds like you’re referring to Jetpack’s contact form though, are you using the Jetpack plugin?
James,
Yes. Jetpack is the one I think. We have that installed on the site and haven’t changed anything there, save for updating.
I can’t find any settings or config for the Jetpack plugin either. Everything is up to date though. Hoping there’s something we can do. Thank you much!
Moderator
James Huff
(@macmanx)
Volunteer Moderator
Ok, it sounds like your hosting provider has disabled PHP’s mail() function, which contact form plugins use. It’s the same function that is used by WordPress to send you comment notifications, or notifications about new users registering on your site.
This is a common safeguard employed by hosting providers when they suspect that another customer on the same server is sending spam emails directly from the server.
Another alternative is that PHP’s mail() function is still active, but spammer activity from the server has already caused any email sent from it to be blacklisted. This would result in the emails being sent, but never received by any email address with basic anti-spam capabilities.
You can check this by leaving a comment on your site and checking if you receive an email. Another alternative would be to use the Check Email plugin and sending yourself a test email to see if it works.
If you didn’t receive a test email, you could try using a plugin like Postman SMTP to configure your WordPress site to use your email’s outgoing mail server instead of PHP’s mail() function.
Thank you, James. I’ll try these options. I don’t understand why now, after 3 years the hosting service would suddenly drop PHP mail. Doesn’t make any sense to me. Especially as we get a couple feedback comments per week without any issues.
I am reaching out to the hosting co to see what they say, but it also aligns with recent updates, so I don’t know which is the culprit yet.
Thanks again for your help. I appreciate it!
Update: I spoke with the hosting people and they tested the PHP mail function and said it’s working fine. Not sure what else could cause it but a change in Jetpack for a update. Any thoughts?
Moderator
James Huff
(@macmanx)
Volunteer Moderator
I noticed i had this problem too yesterday with a customers site.
Maybe you dont have the same problem as this, but you can check if your file is there:
I noticed that /wp-include/class-phpmailer.php was renamed to class-phpmailer.php.hacked
I have no idea why this has happened. I compared the file with a “healthy” one and the content was exact to the byte.
You can try adding this to /wp-config.php
define(‘WP_DEBUG’, true);
define(‘WP_DEBUG_LOG’, true);
define(‘WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY’, false);
and then check your debug log in /wp-content/debug.log if you can see any error from the mail function.
Hi,
Some changes were made to how wp_mail works in 4.6, what would help with troubleshooting this is if you could share your site URL and the title you used under Settings > General for the site title as these are the default values used when sending emails so they would help greatly in tracking this down.
Hello! Thanks everyone for help. I’ll check out the wp-config.php file ASAP. Here’s info requested about the site:
url is courtesyplumbingandheating.com
Site title in settings is Courtesy Plumbing.
Hoping to find a good solution for this. Thanks again.
Hiya,
Just letting you all know we’ve identified the cause for emails failing on some server setups, and it’s being tracked over at https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/37736 (the fix is ready, but won’t be pushed live until a time frame for a potential 4.6.1 is established).
Thanks for the update, Marius! I’ll just handle the issue manually until that patch kicks.
I really appreciate it. Thank you all for your help.
Best,
Nate
Hello again!
Seems that we’re back to square one. After 3 months of the jetpack contact form emailing as expected, it has stopped again. Any ideas what I can do to fix it? I put the newest update through today, but my test submission didn’t create an email.
Would love any insight. We’ll handle it manually again for now.
