Committee

In case anyone finds this thread while attempting to resolve a similar problem, here’s what happened: the problem WAS in fact that I was hitting the relay limit on my hosting site. GoDaddy’s 1000 relays per day limit meant that I could only send out 165 emails with 6 cc’s per day. After I hit this limit, the SpeakUp! plugin continued to correctly log the contact information for everyone who signed up to send an email, but no emails were actually sent out. There were no warning messages of any kind stating that this was happening; the only reason I knew there was a problem was because I had included my own email address amongst the cc’s on the email, and the messages stopped showing up in my mail box after the limit had been hit.

The solution was to migrate my website to another host that offered a significantly higher relay limit. There really should be something about this issue in the SpeakUp! documentation – many cheap webhosting plans have 1000 relay/day limits, and it is something that people should check before launching an email campaign. Also, ALWAYS include a test address as a cc on your email so that you can check that messages are actually being sent!

One final issue: there was apparently something odd about the headers of the email being sent out by SpeakUp! in its default configuration that was causing some servers to intermittently reject emails. The solution was to install the WP-Mail-SMTP plugin, and set it to send mail via SMTP. This is mentioned in the SpeakUp! FAQ as a solution if confirmation emails fail to go through, but it is apparently is necessary for the reliable sending of the actual emails to the targeted elected officials as well.