Permalinks, daylight savings, and email posting issues.

Hi Jeffrey!

“But it doesn’t work” … Can you elaborate? Do you get an error message? If you go to the admin panel, Options, Time Zone, what do you see in the “Detected values” box?

Cheers,
+ Kim

Hi Kim!

I can manually change the ‘Times in the weblog should differ by’ value under in Admin > Options to adjust for daylight savings and get the correct time. However, it won’t adjust automatically. The UTC time is 4 hours ahead of mine and I’m in EST. I tried to use the PHP time function, but couldn’t figure out how to make the ‘I’ work. Simply entering h:I doesn’t work. I get an output of something like 10:0 (with the last zero never changing).

When I activate the timezone plugin, under TimeZone, if the selected timezone (TZ) is left blank (default setting), my timezone reads PDT (which is a -7hr time difference; EST is -5hr). If I change the timezone (TZ) to EST, the timezone offset reads -0500 (which is correct), then when I go back to Options > General the time difference is correct (-5), but the output time is one hour slow because of the UTC time, I’m assuming, which is only 4hr difference.

So what do I do? How can I adjust for this? I tried sending a test message through POP3, but it still won’t post. I’ll leave it there for an hour and see if it appears. I’m assuming that when the time catches up with the sent time, it’ll post.

Thanks Kim!

Well, it’s been over 5 hours since my last post and the post that I sent via POP3 to be posted (too many ‘posts’?) on the blog never appeared. I thought it had to do with a timezone thing, but at this point I have no idea. I re-checked the ‘Writing by e-mail’ settings in Admin > Options > Writing and they all look fine.

Any ideas? What about the .htaccess issue with permalinks? Oh, BTW…when I originally tried to paste the permalink code given to me by WordPress into the .htaccess file and crashed the site, I had to delete and create another .htaccess file. The new file is blank and the site is working fine. Is this ok?

Modern UNIX systems use time zones named after cities. You should try America/New_York as the TZ value, and that will probably work.

The current zoneinfo data (“tzdata”, ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/) shows that EST (Eastern Standard Time) is the same as America/Indianapolis: they don’t have DST at all. The “old style” alias for America/New_York is EST5EDT (so that might work as well, but I would not recommend using it).

After entering the TZ value, click on the Time Zone tab again, and — since DST is currently in effect — you should see “EDT” as the Time zone name in Detected values (not “EST”), and -0400 as the offset (not -0500).

It’s confusing that “time zone name” and “TZ value” are not the same. This is because the “time zone name” is ambiguous: e.g. EST is used for both the US (America/New_York, Eastern Standard Time) and Australia (Australia/Sydney, Eastern Summer Time). TZ values are unique.

I hope this helps.

About the time format: I think you want a lowercase “i” (minutes), not uppercase “I” (whether or not DST is in effect). See https://www.php.net/date for all the letters and their explanations.

Hey ruckus!

Thanks for the timezone help. That seems to have done the trick as far as showing the correct time goes.

I’m still having a problem with posting to the blog from a POP3 account and the permalinks still don’t work as well. Any ideas there?

Ok, thanks to nerdtech’s post, I was able to get the permalinks working. That leaves only the posting directly from a POP3 account problem. Not sure why, but the posts just stay on the server.

I managed to get cronjob working and POP3 emails are now posting. However, I’m getting fairly large gaps between the title of the post and the actual message.

How do I fix this?

that’s just css, take a look at your css and play around with the padding/margins of the corresponding class/id’s.

Dear Jeff,

How did you solve the problem with your emails not posting?

What type of cron job did you do, and for what purpose?

I have created a email alias using one of the random stings plus put
in my Mail server name, Login name and Password.

When I send an email to the new email alias it doesn’t post.

Isn’t it necessary to put in a .forward inside the email alias directory and pipe it to some file for parsing to get the email to post?

You seem to have gotten it working, but how?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Kind regards,
Frank Eckdall
[email protected]

Hey Frank,

It took a little trial and error (mostly error), but I managed to use cronjob on my web hosting site administration panel to get it done.
All you need to do is set up a cronjob to automatically run the wp-mail.php file to check for new incoming mail.

The syntax of the cronjob command line can be a little cryptic looking, but some admin panels have standard and advanced setup modes to help newbies. The cronjob command format basically consists of 6 fields separated by any number of whitespaces (excluding newlines). The first five fields are the times that the job is to be executed in this order: 1. Minute [0,59], 2. Hour [0,23], 3. Day of the month [1,31], 4. Month of the Year [1,12], 5. Day of the week [0,7 (where 0 and 7 are Sunday)]. That last field is that path on your host server to the wp-mail.php file.

Here’s how you want to configure your cronjob command line for a simple 10 minute check for incoming POP3 email:

10 * * * * /usr/bin/lynx -source https://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/wp-mail.php

That should do it. You can change the first five fields if you only wish to check for mail by the hour, day, etc.

Hope this helps!
Jeff

Thanks lawtai! Any idea where WP would decide add a few extra spaces to incoming email posts?

Many thanks Jeff!

I don’t have lynx so I will try curl or wget.

I will try this first and see what happens:
/usr/bin/curl -s -o /dev/null https://mydomain.com/wp-mail.php

When I run it, it says “No output generated” In the past that has
meant everything ok.

Yes! I found the posts! However, I received some warning about
an application wanting to launch before I logged in.

Thank you for taking the time to help me.

Kind regards,
Frank Eckdall

Glad I could help!

Jeff

Hi Jeff,

I’ve been trying to make your advice work with my blog, but no luck so far. I’m not sure what the problem is but I would really like to be able to post via e-mail.

I’ve set the chron job up as you suggested, have given it my URL but so far nothing. One thing I’m not sure of is where does the e-mail address it needs to look at to get the post come in?

Sorry to be so dense, but this is all pretty new to me!

Thanks! – Louie