dtynan

It’s difficult to say what the problem is without more info. It is not uncommon for the email that is sent to the website visitor to not show up (#2 in your original post). However, it is very uncommon for the notification email to not show up (#1 in your original post – the CF7 email).

It’s possible there is something wrong with your hosting account email — I have seen that once before. However, it’s more likely that the From: of the email is causing the problem. That is almost always the issue for the #2 scenario (the one going to the website visitor). It’s not usually the problem for the #1 scenario, but it could be, depending on exactly what you put in the CF7 form.

The reason the From: causes problems so often in the #2 scenario is that on shared-hosting computers, the From: of the email gets set to some account on the shared hosting computer itself (normally this is completely unrelated to your domain or set up). That makes the receiving email system think that it is spam and it blocks it. This is common when the website visitor has a Yahoo email address (and some other providers also do it). EBD does not provide a way to set that From: value without an additional plugin, so that’s why this happens a lot. But, it doesn’t usually happen in the #1 scenario because the CF7 form lets you set the From: value. Normally that is set to something that just works by default, but it’s possible that it might not.

So, typically you want the From: value to be a real email account that exists on your hosting cpanel, not like a gmail account or anything like that (because it will look to the receiving email system like there is some non-gmail.com system connecting to it and trying to give it email with a From: of a gmail address, which looks like it would be spam since they don’t match).

Now, since I can’t really see any of your values or try anything, all of the above is really just speculation based on dealing with lots of these email support issues for the past few months. If I had to guess, I would guess that your hosting provider email account is blocking the incoming email (which is technically coming from one of its own systems) because it thinks it is spam. However, it may just be some sort of misconfiguration somewhere that you need to contact hosting provider to figure out.

There are a couple of things we can try before you get to that point though… First, if you can, add a URL to your EBD page in here so I can go try it and just make sure everything looks ok. Second, you could install a plugin like Postman SMTP, which will provide a log of exactly what is happening when the email goes out. I suggest you tell me the URL to try first, if it’s available on the web, and let me check that first. Then, you can do the plugin after that if we need to.

No — it can either send an email or it can add an inline link to the page or it can do both. It looks like you have it set up right now to be ‘inline’ (or possibly ‘both’, though I didn’t get any emails when I tried it).

I tested all 4 of the forms on your page and it is working correctly for the inline link. However, on a couple of them the PDF did not load properly in Chrome (but works fine in Firefox). This is a known issue, but there is no fix for it that I know of. You can workaround the problem by unchecking “Hide/Mask”, which will cause it to throw up a download window in the user’s browser rather than using the PDF viewer to view the PDF inside the browser. That will allow the user to download the PDF, regardless of browser, but obviously it’s not ideal if you want it to display in-browser.

The bug affects some people’s set up and some PDFs, but it’s hard to know which ones or why. It only exhibits itself on Chrome. Some sort of interaction between Chrome’s internal PDF viewer and the way EBD or PHP delivers the file (something to do with byte ranges, but I’ve never been able to figure out why or how to fix it — if it can be fixed … in the past Chrome has had this problem off and on and the issue was a Chrome bug then).

Sorry…

The html field name in the form needs to be “your-email”. It’s possible that’s the problem. Go into your CF7 form and look at the html form part and make sure you have it as “your-email” (and “your-name” if you have a name field in there). See the screenshots page for an example of what I’m talking about – https://wordpress.org/plugins/email-before-download/screenshots/

If that doesn’t fix it then tell me what version of Download Monitor you’re using and also post a URL so I can go try your page.

You have EBD set to “both” correct (“both” meaning link and email delivery) ?

I ran the form a couple of times on your site and your site never tries to connect to my server to deliver the mail, so the problem is definitely on your system. Most likely, the issue is with WordPress trying to send mail — somehow the upgrade broke that. The easiest way to fix that and/or determine if that’s a problem, is to install Postman SMTP. It has a log that will show you what’s happening and any errors that occur.

There are a few other possibilities:
1. some plugin that you upgraded is interfering with mail delivery (pretty unlikely).
2. somehow the EBD settings for that particular form in the database have become invalid. the easiest way to check/fix that is to go into CF7 and duplicate your CF7 form (using the duplicate link). Get the new form ID and then go to your page in WordPress and change your EBD shortcode to use the new form ID. That will cause EBD to store everything back into the database (rather than just reading what is already in there). Sometimes that fixes weird issues.
3. there might be something very wrong with email delivery from the physical computer or your hosting account — this would require your hosting provider to check probably (very unlikely, especially since the problem started after you upgraded).

Download Monitor is required for EBD to function (not Download Manager). Monitor, not Manager

Either install Postman SMTP or Custom Sender for Email Before Download

webmasterhill, I apologize, ignore my previous update for you — that doesn’t apply to your situation, please disregard that.

Please do the following:
1. Find a .jpg file somewhere on your local computer and make the filename something like aaaaa.jpg and then add/upload that file to Download Monitor. Make sure the filename is something you have never used before in Download Monitor. In the Download Monitor screen, make the Title of it be “AAAAA” or something like that (don’t put the quotes). Do not put any punctuation or spaces in the Title. I want a simple 1-word Title and I want the filename to be something simple like aaaaa.jpg (again, no punctuation aside from the period in there).
2. Add a new page to WordPress (this will be your new test page). Do not put anything on the page except the EBD shortcode which will use the latest contact_form_id that you just made (from the duplication I asked you to do) and use the NEW download_id for the new file. Make sure you do not accidentally put the old download_id in there or else you will have to start completely over with a new file (bbbbb.jpg) and so on.
3. See if it works and if not update this ticket with the new URL to the new test page and also give me the URL from the Download Monitor screen for the new download (the URL in the top right of the page).

The point of the above steps is to make sure we have NEW stuff … I don’t want anything coming from the database (no leftover stuff from prior attempts). Make sure you’ve left the EBD settings pretty much as the default for the template stuff where you can put stuff before or after and that junk .. that stuff should be empty in the EBD settings. It would also be helpful if you would disable at least the plugin that disables right-clicking, if not all the extra plugins.

webmasterhill, one quick thing you can check is to go edit your download and on that detail page that appears, look at the top right area and you’ll see a URL. Paste that URL into a browser and hit enter. That will use only WordPress and Download Monitor to get the file (no EBD). Most likely it will not work (because the problem has to do with accessing the file .. permissions, etc as I mentioned above)