It’s difficult to change the admin address within WP without access to the current email account. It can be done through phpMyAdmin (options table, option_name “admin_email”), but you will get a message on the admin screen about verifying the change. You can ignore it since email will now go to the address you set. There are other option values you can set to clear the message, but I don’t recall offhand what they are.
phpMyAdmin can be a dangerous app. You can corrupt the DB by doing the wrong thing. I suggest you make a full DB backup before changing anything.
In any case, the message is just going to relay the fact that there are errors on the site. The same errors should be logged in the PHP error log, so I suggest you look there and resolve whatever errors are being logged.
Is your wordpress user level admin? If yes, then you are able to change the email in Settings >> General.
If you are not one of the admins, try to disable the plugin one by one and see which is the one causing this issue. I have encountered this error recently using the Google Analyticator plugin and after deleted it, the site works again.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for the replies, I’m an admin, so I will try changing that. I have already tried disabling all the plugins and also ensuring wordpress and plugins all have latest updates.
@bcworkz where do I find the PHP error log?
Path location varies by server setup. There ought to be a way to access it it through your hosting account control panel.
BTW, I’ve since learned a bit more about changing admin email without access to the current email account. As long as you don’t try to change the email in the WP interface, the persisting message about a pending email change will not be displayed when the email is changed through phpMyAdmin. If by chance you already tried to use the WP interface, the message can be suppressed through phpMyAdmin as well. Delete the options keyed new_admin_email and adminhash. Likely close to the last entries in the table.
