No emails sending after last update – they knew and didn’t warn - [WP SMTP] Review

eftcolumbus
(@eftcolumbus)

1 year, 12 months ago
In the most recent update around April 2022, they pushed a release that made the plugin not work because the update erased your credentials. And they admit knowing it would happen. But there was no warning, no note to make note of your credentials before the update. Many other plugins push warnings like “Major update – backup your site before updating” or “This update is not backward compatible with the last version”. They could have done something like that. THEN they keep saying this isn’t an issue, as if they have no responsibility for this, and it is not their fault. How is NONE OF MY EMAILS ARE SENT after the update not an issue??? Yes this IS your fault, because all I did was update. The plugin has one job to send emails and after updating this doesn’t happen.

Yes it can be fixed and sure it’s a good thing to encrypt the credentials, but my site and many others went a week or more without sending out any emails. Because they didn’t warn us that we had to do other things for it to work. Read the support tickets for April 2022, you’ll see so many people reported this. And they just kept saying “Not an issue”. So now I can’t trust them for future updates to not just break the plugin and not tell me.
- This topic was modified 1 year, 12 months ago by eftcolumbus.
- This topic was modified 1 year, 12 months ago by eftcolumbus.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

Miha
(@mplusb)

1 year, 12 months ago
Dear @eftcolumbus,

First off, thank you for taking the time to leave a review and share your thoughts.

We also want to sincerely apologize for the trouble our latest update caused.

With this in mind, I would like to take a moment to explain that nowhere did we mention that ‘this isn’t an issue’ or refuse to take responsibility for this issue. These forums are public and anyone that has an account on wp.org can comment and reply to topics/reviews.
If you check this support thread you will notice that a wp.org user replied, not our team. When a plugin’s support member answers it will be mentioned: Plugin support or Plugin author – screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/3CBqp6Z
With this in mind, I do not believe it is fair to state that we kept saying it’s not an issue, when we did not do that.

I completely understand your feedback regarding the addition of warning when a major update is released, and we did just that a few days back. We released a new update that will warn users if their credentials are not entered correctly, so they are aware there might be an issue. Version 1.2.5 will show a warning in the next 2 scenarios:
– if your current credentials & SMTP information (mail server info) is not correct
– on saving, if your entered credentials & SMTP information that is not correct.

Regarding the update:
In version 1.2.4 we have changed the way we store the credentials in the database for the mailing system, going from plain text information to encrypted information. This was done to improve the plugin and make it safer.

During this process there was an error of judgement on our part, for which we truly are sorry, that made the backwards compatibility process a bit unreliable.

Once more, thank you for writing in and sharing your feedback – please accept our apologies for the trouble caused.

Respectfully,
Mihaela
- This reply was modified 1 year, 12 months ago by Miha. Reason: grammar
- This reply was modified 1 year, 12 months ago by Miha. Reason: missing letters
Thread Starter eftcolumbus
(@eftcolumbus)

1 year, 12 months ago

OK I’m willing to concede if you say this guy tanohex is answering support tickets and he is not on your team. But then that means your team did not answer my very big issue support ticket in 5 days, which isn’t as bad as saying it isn’t an issue, but it’s still not responsive support to such a big problem.

Also there was another support ticket from probably 12 days ago reporting the same problem which has been deleted in the last day or two (why?) that was at the URL https://wordpress.org/support/topic/psa-ensure-proper-username-pw-after-update/ (got this from my browsing history) where this issue was reported. He was also told it wasn’t an issue, but with it having been deleted I can’t tell who said that.

I’m glad you are finally doing something about warnings now several weeks after the release, BUT you should also tell people to copy and paste their credentials before updating because if you set up your sending with a 3rd party many years ago like I did, it can be very time consuming to find those credentials again. I would have had no problems or complaints if you had the warning to Copy credentials before updating and then paste them after the update.

Tano
(@tanohex)

1 year, 12 months ago

Dear @eftcolumbus please stop acting like you’re entitled, as is bad for your health.
The only 2 things in the world you’re entitled to are your own life and health. The rest are just choices and things that happen.

In the entire web management/development world, there’s an important rule that tells everyone to double-check before and after an update, to see if everything is ok.
Many times, updates will break things (like the one time my mobile banking app became unresponsive after an update), so it’s standard practice to verify something after you‘ve made changes to it.

However, the frightening issue here is that you don’t even know your own mail server credentials, but you’re updating important stuff, and you’re all over the internet blaming people for issues.
You, my dear, are a danger not only to the website/software you’re handling, but probably to yourself also.

In this review, you have a person apologizing to you, when they are providing a free resource and struggle to keep it updated, so that you can safely use it – for free! This world is just…

Maybe a cold shower and a look in the mirror would help, as the main issue here is not 100% software related.
Best of luck!