Emails going to wrong customer

Very strange. Are there any logs available in your mail service (whether provided by the host or a dedicated mail service)? It’d be interesting to see at what point the recipients are getting mixed up. And it’d be interesting to have a customer forward the raw email (with headers) to you so you could see whether they were the actual recipient, or were possibly CC’d.

You could also scrutinize the headers area in WP Mail Logging to make sure it’s not something in a plugin or functions.php setting up a CC/BCC.

Thanks for the hints Dan, I think I have narrowed down the problem.

The site is for a martial arts school (with different locations) which has different instructors (customers) who all place orders. When the orders are ready, they need to be collected from the main school.

I added a plugin to enable custom order status i.e ‘Ready for Collection’ but then found that I needed to enable an email notification to the customer. However Woocommerce was only letting me fix a specific email address on this status (I wish there was an option to add customers on non-default status)

That had then led me to install another plugin ‘Woo Custom Emails’ which had 2 options:

Recipients
Recipients email addresses separated with comma << I left this empty

Send Only To Customer?
( Enable this to send this email to customer. If this field is enabled then Recipients field will be added to BCC. ) << I ticked this box.

This had been working fine in this configuration for well over a year.

BUT based on what you suggested, I could see in the header that other recipients were randomly receiving these emails, only for this status change. Indeed, when I looked closer at WP Mail Logging, it was adding people into the BCC.

It must be something to do with leaving the Recipients email addresses empty alongside changes in Woocommerce/Wordpress. For now I’ve entered another generic email address I can dump things in to to see if it patches the problem.

That particular plugin hasn’t been updated for a while so I need to hunt for something else I guess. Although as I said, I wish that I could just enable a customer notification from the in-built Woocommerce email settings screen. I’m not sure why customers can only receive emails on certain status.

Thanks again for your help

Mike

@miketurnermk Thank you for sharing those details.

However Woocommerce was only letting me fix a specific email address on this status

Did you use a special plugin to create the custom order status, or did you do that through coding?

I’m thinking –and I’m not sure this will work, so you’ll have to test it- that you can use a plugin like AutomateWoo to send that email. This plugin lets you automate tasks that are triggered upon certain triggers. So, you could create an email that is triggered when an order changes from status A to status B.

What I’m not sure of is whether AutomateWoo will recognize your custom status so that you can configure a trigger for it. But WooCommerce.com has a 30-day refund policy, so you can buy the extension and if it ends up not working for this you can request a refund within that timeframe.

Since the original issue has been resolved as per the above discussion, I’m marking this thread as Resolved.