not receiving notifications of download ANYMORE

P,S and i forgot to mention too that each time one tries to download the pdf now gets the warning : “failed to send your message. Please try later or contact the administrator by another method.” but it actually sends the link!

That error message is coming from Contact Form 7, not Email Before Download.

In the CF7 form you made, the email info you put in there is for the Notification Email — that’s the one that goes to you and tells you what people downloaded. That’s the one that isn’t working for you. EBD will also send an email to the person who filled in the form on your website if you set EBD to “email” or to “both” in the EBD settings (which it sounds like you have). Thus, the CF7 email is not being sent properly and the EBD email is.

You need to go back into your CF7 form that you made (the one you’re using in your EBD shortcode) and look at your email-related settings in there and see if things look ok. Maybe the To: is going to a bad email address rather than to you.

i did say though that this worked fine in the beginning. i was notified of emails- now- no more. how do you explain that? i have NOT touched any CF7 form or settings in EBD, was way too busy doing other things in my life. And i just double checked, yep the email in form for EBD is correct.

I don’t have any explanation, I was just trying to figure out what might be wrong. No idea how it could have changed. You checked and said it didn’t change, so obviously that wasn’t it.

Still in the CF7 form, the template part where you put in the fields for the form that displays to the user (to ask for his name & email address), check your field names there and make sure that the email address one is “your-email” and not something else. If it’s something else, change it to “your-email”.

If that doesn’t fix it, then I suggest the following:

1. First, make sure you can get email from WordPress to your admin email address. Easiest way to check that is to add a wordpress user and then delete it. You should get an email. If you don’t, then the problem isn’t the plugins, it’s your wordpress or your environment/machine.

2. If you do get admin email just fine, then I suggest making a new form in CF7. Set the form to go to your admin email address. Use the CF7 shortcode (NOT the EBD shortcode) and make a new wordpress page and put that CF7 shortcode in there. Then, use a browser and go to that page, put something in the form, hit submit, and see if the email goes through or if you get the same error. If it doesn’t go through, or you get the same error, then I suggest you try the CF7 forum for support. Or, you could try installing an SMTP plugin like Postman SMTP and then looking in the log it makes and it might clue you in to what the problem is

If none of the above helps, then it’s possible something really low-level is messed up with your websites email — you might need to engage tech support at your hosting provider, but we’re not at that point yet.

the form of this download shows:
to : MY EMAIL IS CORRECT ([email protected])

from : [your-name]

message body: From: [your-name] <[your-email]>
Subject: [your-subject]

Message Body:
[your-message]
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thanks for the suggestions but i’d much rather use another plugin. this is not a reliable one for me. any recommendations?
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my wordpress email works perfectly. i receive all notifications and form contacts etc in that email (i tested it again).
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i saw other people are experiencing the same problem (in the forum) and their problem was not never resolved. so, thats a sign there.
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i invite the author of this plug to fix this if he doesnt want to lose more users.

thanks for trying anyway, kind of you!

There is no one on here without a resolved problem other than you. Everyone has a working installation as far as I am aware.

The problem you’re having is coming from Contact Form 7. You should try what I said and make a form using just CF7 to isolate the problem and see if it goes away or not. Takes like 5 minutes to try.

If you don’t want to try to fix it, that’s fine, but it’s not EBD’s fault as far as I can tell from what you’ve given so far.

Don’t have any recommendations for other plugins that do the same thing.

Also, you might want to check your PHP error log and see if it has logged the underlying error that is causing CF7 to not be able to send email. Usually your PHP error log is available through your hosting provider’s interface (cpanel or whatever). Or, you can look at the individual files yourself, which are usually called “error_log” and they get dropped around in multiple places in your wordpress installation (usually). One of them may have info as to what has happened — start with any in the Contact Form 7 directories, then try the various wordpress directories.

ps – if you post over in Contact Form 7 for support, be sure and tell them your hosting provider name, what version of CF7 & WP you are using, etc.

5 min? lol. sure, i wasted already all my evening with discovering, testing and understanding this…. Instead of being so sure its not EBD maybe look at other questions in the forum (where you suggested the same thing- do you think its normal to have to create ANOTHER form because the original one stopped working for no valid reason? no. sorry… ) so title of the forum questions goes ’email notification’, have a look.
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and sorry, what other info you want me to give ? . i gave all you asked.
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and you didn’t address the error message: “try again, failed” etc BUT it actually sends. Of course,nevermind.
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cheers
–saw ur second message now. thanks. but if i never had a problem with CF7..why shall i contact THEM?! ( i did say my contact forms work great except when making it work with EBD).

I’m not saying you should have to create a form to fix the problem. I’m saying create a form to try and determine where the problem lies. In troubleshooting software issues you often have to try a number of things to narrow down where the issue is coming from — they are not necessarily going to be the solution to the problem.

I looked in the CF7 plugin code and the message you are getting appears to come from two possible codes — one is ‘spam’ and the other is ‘mail_sent_ng’. The spam case is where something on your system (like Akismet or other plugin or possibly another application is blocking the outgoing email because it thinks it is spam). The mail_sent_ng appears to be a catch-all for just a general mail failed case (at first I thought it might be related to nginx, but doesn’t appear to be).

One last thought, you might try changing the To: of the email (in the CF7 form) to be JUST the email address (no name beside it or any punctuation or anything), just plain email address (your admin email address I mean).

Also, I did address the error message and it still actually sending. Here it is again:

CF7 sends the email that is failing (the one that goes to the email address in the To: in the CF7 settings of the CF7 form you made).

EBD sends the email that is working (the one that goes to the email address the user typed into the form on your webpage when he visited that page, filled in his name & email, and hit submit to try and get the file download you set up using EBD)

i see. this could make sense (the splitting emails). well i have no idea whats blocking to send me the emails. i had deactivated Akismet a while ago because it was very annoying. So i dont know what else might be blocking it as spam.

The “to” field is JUST my email address. nothing before nothing after

hmmm. i’m not sure either. is your page public? i can make sure EBD is POSTing the right variables, but beyond that I’m not sure what else to check. The CF7 support forum might be helpful .. or you could try the Postman SMTP plugin and see if it’s logging is useful (I don’t know if it would be)

This may help you:

https://kb.cf7skins.com/contact-form-7-email-issues/

and this:

https://contactform7.com/2016/01/15/red-border-error-issue-on-wordpress-441/