New Post Doesn't Send Email Notifications

  • Hello Everyone,

    I have had my blog for nearly a year and a half now, and the email notifications that are sent out when I publish a new post have always worked. That is, until now. I usually schedule my posts for a specific time each day, and in the past that has not proved to be a problem either.

    My website is:
    https://www.benchblog.com

    However, my most recent post did not send out any email notifications when it was published. I spent a little time on these forums looking into the issue, and found several recommendations to change the post status back to draft, update it, and then re-publish it. For the people that mentioned this, it fixed their problem. I have tried this multiple times no to avail. I have also tried scheduling the post for a future time, and waiting to see if notifications go out at that time. They do not.

    The post does get published, and if one were to go to my site, the post is visible, but no notifications are ever sent.

    More importantly, my blog is one of many that show up on a site called unpluggedshop.com. This site serves as a sort of blog aggregator for woodworking blogs. Almost all of the web traffic to my site comes from referrals from unpluggedshop.com. My most recent post did not show up on their site, and I can only conclude that since this is the first time that this has happened, it must somehow be related to my site failing to send email notification for the same post.

    With no email notifications going out and no links to my site appearing on unpluggedshop.com, there has been virtually no views of my latest post. I have reviewed all of my wordpress settings and everything appears normal. I have not changed any of the setting recently that could have caused this problem.

    I believe that my email subscriptions are handled by jetpack. I need help. My site is essentially unusable for me until I can fix this. There’s no point in me posting anything else to my blog, if no-one knows it is there to be viewed.

    Any help or insight you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

    Jonathan

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/jetpack/

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)
  • Thread Starter Jonathan White

    (@jonathan-white-1)

    I thought I should follow up with what steps I have taken so far.

    I’ve checked the subscription settings within my WP admin page, and everything seems to be set as it should.

    Someone suggested that I test my sites ability so send an email, by logging off and then clicking on the “forgot password” link on the WP-Admin log-in page. I got an error message, so I contacted my web hosting service to see if there are any problems at that end. They worked with me for a couple of hours trying to trouble shoot the problem. They fixed a few things and sent me an email summary of what they did. Here is what they reported back:

    The following changes were made:

    1. Renamed the php.ini file in your directory, as it was triggering some PHP errors in the server’s error log. The sendmail_path is now properly site, and we confirmed your site can send out emails via WordPress for new comments and password resets.

    2. I noticed in the Apache error log that requests from Jetpack to the xmlrpc.php file were being blocked by ModSecurity. I reached out to one of our system administrators and we disabled ModSecurity for your account to prevent this from happening in the future.

    3. Enabled WordPress Debug output in the wp-config.php file. This will show even un-important notices (which can sometimes be helpful). To disable debug mode, open up the wp-config.php file and look for the line with WP_DEBUG and change the value from ‘true’ to ‘false’.

    Lastly, I changed the post back to a draft and republished it… No luck, still no subscription emails.

    I don’t know if wordpress/jetpack only sends out emails when a post is initially published and any updates or re-publishing the post don’t trigger the emails? To check, I deleted the post and created a new one with the same content. I then published this post.

    No subscription emails were sent.

    I don’t know what to do next.

    Thread Starter Jonathan White

    (@jonathan-white-1)

    I forgot to add that I have also disabled the plugin “WP Super Cache” in case it is interfering in some way.

    Plugin Contributor Ryan C.

    (@ryancowles)

    Hi Jonathan! Thanks for all of the information. I’ve been talking with my colleague Chase, and it sounds like he’s been corresponding with you via email. He’s going to followup with you there, just to make sure we don’t get our lines crossed.

    Thread Starter Jonathan White

    (@jonathan-white-1)

    Thanks for the help.

    Unfortunately the problem has not been resolved. I have spent several hours on the phone with tech support at my server host and this has them baffled. They have reviewed all that they can and don’t know where to go from here.

    They asked if you had a list of things that they could try to trouble-shoot this?

    Some of the changes that they made, restored my site’s ability to send comment moderation emails, but then they upgraded my php file to ver. 5.4 (I have no idea what this means) and now the comment moderation emails have stopped again. They are in the process of restoring my site from last night’s backup to undo this change.

    I emailed the owner of the unpluggedshop.com website and he informed the that his site picks up blog posts from mine based upon my RSS feed. He also said that my site’s RSS feed page is showing an error.

    I’m really frustrated as everything was working fine and just stopped. I didn’t make any changes to my site or settings that corresponded with the loss of function.

    I’m stuck and could sure use some ideas for how to fix this.

    For the last week or so I’ve been experiencing delays of around 20 mins on emails to subscribers, previously they were always immediate.

    https://isoc-ny.org/p2

    My site the NHLaborNews.Com recently started the same problem.

    I have 150 email subscribers but when I press a new post they are not being emailed. How do I fix this?

    Thread Starter Jonathan White

    (@jonathan-white-1)

    I just tried posting a completely new post. It was text only with no images.

    The subscription email worked as it should. Have you ever heard of a post that that won’t send out email notifications for one post when it will for another? Do you think it is possible for images to cause the problem? I just don’t get this.

    I’ll try another new post in the next few days and see what happens.

    Plugin Contributor Ryan C.

    (@ryancowles)

    @jonathan White: Thanks for the update! Could you provide me with a link to the post that worked, as well as to a post that did not work? And have you tried to publish any new posts since?

    @wwwhatsup and @[email protected]: Could you please start your own thread, as per the Forum Welcome?

    https://www.ads-software.com/support/plugin/jetpack#postform

    Thank you!

    Thread Starter Jonathan White

    (@jonathan-white-1)

    Hi Ryan,

    The post that would not send any email notifications was here:

    https://benchblog.com/2015/03/waxing-philosophical-on-vise-chops-26th-attempt/

    I have since published two other posts that did work. They can be found here:

    https://benchblog.com/2015/03/the-grizz-ubo-bench-gets-some-shoes/

    And here:

    https://benchblog.com/2015/03/completing-the-leg-mortises-in-the-workbench-top/

    Both of these posts worked fine and my site seems to be back to normal. Here’s the thing that really strikes me as odd. The first post above (the one that didn’t work) also crashed my RSS feed. I used an RSS Feed checker site, https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=www.benchblog.com%2Ffeed, and it showed an error in the text of the problem post. It didn’t say specifically what the error was (something about “Input is not proper UTF-8”), nor was it apparent to me after studying the text looking for any unusual or unexplained characters.

    I went into the settings page of my dashboard and changed my RSS feed to only show the last 2 posts instead of the last 5, and the RSS feed problems went away. This tells me that the problem is specifically within the content of the problem post. As to what that problem actually is, I have no idea.

    Any thoughts?

    Thanks for your help,

    Jonathan

    Plugin Contributor Ryan C.

    (@ryancowles)

    Hi Jonathan,

    Thanks again for the update, and I apologize for the delay. We’re working on a backlog of support requests, and generally answer in the order that they are received.

    Could you please create a temporary account for me on your site? Then send us an email with the login credentials. Once I have that information, I can login to troubleshoot things a bit further, and you can delete the account when I am finished.

    Please let me know how that sounds to you! And be sure to email us privately with the login information.

    Thanks again for your patience!

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)
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