3.4 All Email Functionality Broken

Have you tried:

– deactivating all plugins to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate the plugins one by one until you find the problematic plugin(s).

– switching to the Twenty Eleven theme to rule out any theme-specific problems.

– resetting the plugins folder by FTP or PhpMyAdmin. Sometimes, an apparently inactive plugin can still cause problems.

– re-uploading all files & folders – except the wp-content folder – from a fresh download of WordPress.

Hello esmi – thanks for the response!

I’ve done steps 1-3 on our staging server without any luck. I’m a little wary about trying step 4 since we are using multisite – but I’ll give it a shot and report back.

As a temporary fix I’ve been setting up SMTP on all of our sites that have registration forms (we have close to 50 sites on the network) – but this is problematic as passwords on email accounts in our organization expire every 3 months. On the plus side, the plugin I used to do this lets you toggle between SMTP and the default WP phpmailer. When I run a test email using the WP phpmailer, I get this: (redacted has been substituted where sensitive information appeared)

[Log moderated. Please use the pastebin]

The SMTP debugging output is shown below:

Could not instantiate mail function.

OK, had a problem getting the files to copy over webdav so we had to get our server team to copy it over for us – but it’s done, and unfortunately no luck. They are looking through error logs to see if they can find anything, but it’s not looking good. Any other ideas? Thanks!

Hi I updated all my sites last night. All email stopped working for everything. I used contact form 7, counterize etc.

THE FIX: I went on to a forum on the contact form 7 developer site and someone suggested downloading
WP-Mail-SMTP plugin
https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/wp-mail-smtp/

I downloaded and activated now everything works. No need to mess with any settings. Just activate it.

Would love to know what happened in WP 3.4 to make php mail to stop working.

Hi nctech2012,

That is the same plugin that we used to get the debugging output. I forgot to use pastebin before so it was removed. Here is the output we’re getting:

https://pastebin.com/hekj5eeQ

Unfortunately just installing that plugin didn’t do anything to fix the problem here. We are currently using it as a work around until we can get phpmailer working again – our smtp passwords expire every three months so it would be a bit problematic to use it long term (we run a MU network of around 50 sites).

The only thing listed on the changelog for 3.4 is “Update PHPMailer to 5.2.1”.

Thanks! Glad you got yours working.

Hi Robert. Not only do you have to install it you have to activate the plug in.

Did you activate?

Yeah, it’s activated on several sites now but it doesn’t fix anything until I enter SMTP settings. If I don’t put any SMTP settings in it acts just like it did before – no emails. I get the output in the pastebin above when I try to send a test email, with the result:

Could not instantiate mail function.

Hi there …

on my 3.4 Worpdress Site I’m having the same Problem …
… I hope there will be a fix soon …

Just a question … how did you setup the SMTP Pluhin?
Do you send the mails now over SMTP oder with WordPress`?

CU No.Trace !!!