Notifications and sending email for reservation doen’t work correctly

Hi @fmr1971,

Sorry to hear you’ve had such a frustrating experience. There are many things that can effect email delivery, because it relies on the proper interaction between settings in the plugin, your email server’s configuration, your DNS settings, your server IP’s reputation, and a host of filtering and blocking rules on the recipient server, which can be different from one recipient to the next.

The FAQ includes a 5-step checklist to help you narrow down the problem. But it sounds like you’ve already gone through a bunch of steps.

My recommendation would be for you to record the date and time of an email that should have been received but wasn’t, then take that to your web host. They should be able to check the logs to determine for sure if an email was actually sent. If it wasn’t, they should be able to say why the email server refused to send it. If it was sent, they should be able to help you figure out why it was never received, such as investigating any return messages from the recipient server.

I understand this can be frustrating to track down. All I can say is that the plugin sends email using a core WordPress function — the same one that sends comment notification emails — and is being used without problems on more than 10,000 websites at the moment. If you can identify any specific issues that are causing problems with your setup, I’m happy to help you resolve those.

Dear Nate,

thank You for your answer.
I must apologize to you for what is written.
I was obviously very frustrated.
But I have tested your plugin on another server, and, indeed, everything works perfectly. I receive both the email administrator, both the user.
The problem, then, is a server-side problem. My maintainer is Unlimited Webhosting and now I’m asking them what setting would prevent sending and receiving email.
I hope that the matter can be resolved positively.
Thanks again and I’m sorry for what I wrote.

Filippo

Hi Nat,

I finally found out what is the specific problem.
My Provider uses Barracuda Spam Firewall on his server.
Barracuda set a score spam for each email you want to send.
Anything over 2.0 score is blocked.
The score for my blocked email is the following:

0.00 BAD_ENC_HEADER Message has bad MIME encoding in the header
0.00 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
0.00 HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_12 BODY: HTML: images with 800-1200 bytes of words
0.00 HTML_SHORT_LINK_IMG_1 HTML is very short with a linked image
1.63 HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_12_2 HTML: images with 800-1200 bytes of words
0.14 HTML_SHORT_LINK_IMG_1_2 HTML is very short with a linked image
1.00 BSF_SC0_SA828 Custom Outbreak Rule BSF_SC0_SA828

Therefore, in my email the specific problem was the signature-image I put at the bottom of the email template in your plugin options (notifications).

If I remove the image the email are sent and received.

I don’t understand the mean of the Custom Outbreak Rule (BSF_SC0_SA828) in the last row.
The provider told me that Barracuda do not disclose what their custom rules are. It will be something in the email formatting or content that is more likely to be spam but not blocked out right.

So, if You want to use the beautiful Restaurant Reservation plugin on a WP site hosted on a server with Barracuda, I recommend to insert in email template no signature-image.

Bye

Filippo

Hi Filippo,

Thanks for reporting back on what you found. That helps identify problems when other people face similar issues.

Interesting to see Barracuda blocking just for a linked image. That seems pretty strict! If you want to keep your email content just the way you want it, I’d recommend you check out a third-party mailing service. I use Postmark and wrote a bit about getting it working for restaurants:

https://themeofthecrop.com/2016/05/24/make-sure-restaurant-emails-delivered-every-time/

It takes a bit of technical wrangling to set your DNS records, but once set up you’ll get much better delivery rates than you can get from your own server.