[Plugin: Subscribe2] Error notice in latest version!

@phjohan,

Individuals leaving messages and as such their emails should have no bearing on this at all.

I’ll try to give you some simple steps to follow based on the following assumptions.
1) You have an admin level user account on your blog
2) You have an email address on-domain with your blog (so if your site is https://www.example.com you have an address like [email protected] that you want to use for sending the notifications.

So, now you have these things, log into your WordPress site and go to Users -> Add New. Create a new user account using the email and make sure you set the role as Administrator.

Once that is done go to Subscribe2->Settings and where it says “Send Email From:” and there is a drop down list, select the user name of the account you just created.

Emails will now be sent from this account and hopefully pass your hosting providers anti-spam policies.

1. You have an admin level user account on your blog – Yes
2. You have an email address on-domain with your blog – No. The email address on domain is in the settings area. Changing the email address in the user area to the domain will create many emails from blogs and posts. The user name is called admin and is not on the drop down list. Thanks for the quick response.

“Once that is done go to Subscribe2->Settings and where it says “Send Email From:” and there is a drop down list, select the user name of the account you just created.” – My choices are post author, the website name, or my real name. My preferred is the website name.

Of course, I have over 10,000 emails on the list that are both valid or invalid and growing. That is why I selected unlimited as a choice. Thus, looking for answers since more work is proceeding. Thanks is advance for the advice.

@phjohan,

Why don’t you create a new on-domain email address then to use for sending the notifications?

@mattyrob,

Thanks for the suggestion and will give this a try.

@mattyrob,

“Why don’t you create a new on-domain email address then to use for sending the notifications? ” – Does not work and must be doing something wrong or confused. Clarifications:
A new domain email address was created on my host ipage
A new user was created with admin rights
Logged into the Dashboard using new user
Created a preview test to one person – OK
Created a send email to many including myself and was not received, however states message sent. Thank you in advance. I think this problem requires some dissecting. Many = 10,000+

@phjohan,

If you’ve created that email and updated the sender correctly then I expect that the next part of your issues is that you have so many subscribers. You will certainly be exceeding the send limit with that number of subscribers on any free or paid hosting service.

You need to remove the invalid emails and throttle the mail sending. Alternatively, if this is a business you need to consider paying for a proper and reliable email marketing solution.

I am having this problem too; Subscribe2 has always worked with the setting “Post author” as the sender of the mail (even though author’s mail adress is from a different domain, since the website is on an intranet domain). Apparently after a certain update it just stopped working. My question is what has been changed so it stopped working.

When sending a mail from the “send an email to subscribers” panel, I get the following message:

“Could not instantiate mail function.”

Any help is much appreciated.

@tibor,

The code has not been changed – this is a warning message giving one of the main reasons why emails fail to send.

If your WordPress is an intranet site you need to speak with your network admins and whoever set up the server to find out why the mail function cannot be instantiated. Sometimes it has been disabled, sometimes it needs an authenticated log in.

Thx for the quick notice!

Strange thing is that I get new post notifications in my admin mailbox, so apparently it is working, but only to the admin’s mail adres.

@tibor,

Try settings the number of recipients per email to 1 in the settings page. This will avoid use of the BCC header in the notification emails. It may be that this header is being stripped out and ignored on your server. That might explain why you get the email but nobody else does.

@mattyrob, that did it.

Thanks again for the lightning fast reply! You’ve made my day!

Hi mattyrob, i could be wrong but i think there is a prob with this warning

in the ‘Send Email From’ dropdown, there are 3 ‘types’ of choices:
– post author
– user1/2/3..
– blog name

i started by using the blog name, so i would assume it checks the email settings under ‘Settings -> General -> E-mail Address’. I tried setting this email to use the same as the domain, but i still get this warning,
and since i hate to see error msgs, i tried to use your suggestion, to create a user with the domain email, which ‘solved’ the prob (eliminated the warning), but the issue is like this:

the outgoing mail server has the hosting domain name, and is different from the incoming address which has the blog domain name..

here’s a short version of the email source:

Delivered-To: [email protected]
Return-Path: <[email protected]>
Received: from 253717.hostname.net ([xxx.xxx.xxx.xx])
To: [email protected]
Subject: =xxxx=
From: blogname <[email protected]>
Reply-To: blogname <[email protected]>

so you can see that the sender (hostname mail server) is diff from the ‘from/reply-to’ which uses the domain name.
when i gave the new user the hosting email (outgoing), i still got the warning, and only when i used the domain (incoming) email, the warning disappeared..

i’m no email expert, but not sure if this makes much sense? is it ok to have the ‘From’ diff from the ‘Receieved: from’?

also note that although i get this warning, the emails are working fine..

also when using the ‘post author’ choice, it might not make sense for many blogs as mostly users use their own email address and not the domain’s? altho having this option won’t hurt..

@finklez,

I’m aiming to improve the sensitivity of the error message in the next version so hopefully that will help.

With respect to your issue with your email headers, the “Received:” header is a server name and if you are on shared hosting this will never be the same as your domain. The Return-Path is being set on the server too which is why it’s different from the “From:” and “Reply-To” headers.

I had the same issue with my provider and they resolved it with a php.ini file in my subdirectory.