Moderator
James Huff
(@macmanx)
Volunteer Moderator
It sounds like your hosting provider has disabled PHP’s mail() function, which is used by WordPress to send you comment notifications, or notifications about new users registering on your site, and contact form plugins.
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.
“Check email” works to send an email from my blog dashboard to me. So what is the next step in fixing this? WP is pretty hobbled as a blog platform without email notification of comments.
Lorette
Moderator
James Huff
(@macmanx)
Volunteer Moderator
Hm, that’s very odd. I wonder if your comment notification emails are hitting a high enough spam threshold that they’re automatically “nuked” by your email’s spam filter.
In this case, I recommend setting up Postman SMTP to see if there’s any improvement.
Hi James,
I have experienced the same problem of not getting email notifications on visitors’ comments.
Installed Postman SMTP, configured it and got a test message OK,
BUT – when an actual comment is posted, I do NOT get an email.
Interestingly – when I look in the LOG, there are no records there at all
I am lost, will appreciate any idea to try…
Cheers
Alex
James and Alex,
I’ve been out of town so didn’t have a chance to try the Postman “fix” until this week. After I started the setup wizard, I discovered that it requires a monthly or annual fee to use this, so didn’t install.
I’m still MOSTLY not getting comments to my blog emailed to me. About 1 in 10 perhaps will come through, just randomly. I have a knitting blog, with perhaps 5-10 comments per post at MOST, so this is not a volume based spam problem.
Seriously, this really makes WordPress a bit useless for me as a blog platform. Yes, I can answer the comments from within Dashboard, but that posts the comments back to my blog rather than emailing them to my friends who comment. Nobody comes back to read these, so that’s a useless option as well.
Let me know if you have other ideas.
Lorette
Hi Lorette,
There is a myth about this topic – BLOG… many people are expecting too much, too soon…
Fact is that only the companies with the big wallets actually get it, e/g Facebook…
I stumbled by chance on the problem I had. I installed on the blog a plug-in called akismet, this was supposed to protect my blog from Spam, it obviously did a very good job, it blocked sending me emails…
I uninstalled it, all works fine now…
Maybe you have some plug-in on your blog that is doing a too good job?
Cheers
Alex : P/S – how can I add my picture / avatar on this blog?
I don’t think it’s too much to expect that an advertised feature works. And I’ve tried disabling ALL of the plug ins. Doesn’t help. And besides, I can see on the WP dashboard which comments Akismet has marked as spam. None of the missing comments are in there, it’s all real spam.
Lorette
I just had a problem about email notification. I added 2 od my email to the ‘subscriv=be by email’.
I am not getting my post via email when published. The last successful one was on 18 Novv which was sent to 2 of my emails. ( i do this for checking purpose). I posted last weekeng and I did not receive it via email. I checked the subscribers list and the 2 emails were missing. I have checked the subsribers list before and the 2 emails were there. Why is this happening? I am wondering if a lot of my subscribers are not receiving the email posts.
Any suggestions to rectify this?
(@loretteirene)
7 years, 9 months ago
I have a wordpress blog hosted by Bluehost. The comment email notification worked just fine for years, just recently I haven’t been getting comment notifications sent to my email. Everything is up to date, nothing new added other than the routine WP updates. It’s set to send it to the correct email, the correct boxes are checked to send blog comments, and no, it is NOT going to my email spam, I’ve checked that.
Any suggestions?
Lorette
http://theknittingdoctor.com