Wordfence activity reports are no longer received

Hi there

All the emails from Wordfence, including the account unlock emails, are sent from your site and not ours.?Wordfence uses the built in WordPress function for sending emails.?They usually come from an email address like [email protected] unless you have used a plugin to change that address. ?This means that if your Wordfence emails aren’t working, it’s possible that your WordPress installation can’t send emails at all. A first good check then is to see if you can send emails using any other plugins (contact forms etc) and/or if you are able to receive user registration and password reset emails from WordPress core.

In the “Other Tests” section of the Wordfence Tools > Diagnostics page there is a function that you can use to test email on your site. You can try that to see if it works. Look for where it says “Send a test email from this WordPress server to an email address”.

If you aren’t getting emails like scan results the 3 most common issues are:?

1. Your hosting provider has disabled outgoing mail on your web server (this mail is different from your personal email like [email protected]).

2. Your server mail service (usually postfix or sendmail) is broken or has a stuck mail queue. Most of the time you hosting provider can perform a restart of the service to get them working again.

3. Your email client is sending emails from [email protected] straight to the junk mail folder or your ISP is blocking them as suspicious. You should whitelist that email address to ensure they get through since they cover many different alerts besides Wordfence ones.

Check these to see if one of the solutions can help. ?

Best,

Joshua

Thanks for your reply Joshua.

I should have clarified that all site emails, including other Wordfence emails, are sent and received properly. The test email and test activity report came through. The “Problems found on” emails come through. Admin login emails come through.

It’s only the daily activity reports that fail.

Any ideas? Thanks again!

Hi there,
Would it be possible to head over to Wordfence > All Options > Email Alert Preferences and see if the Activity Alerts have been set to less alerts?

Please let me know!

Thanks,

Joshua

Thanks again for your reply Joshua!

I don’t know if this was the setting it used to be on, but I see that “Enable email summary” was only set to once a week. Is that responsible for sending the activity reports? Even if that’s the case, we only received two reports in January.

Besides that, everything is checked except alert when non-admin user signs in – and “Alert me with scan results of this severity level or greater” is set to “Low”

Any other ideas? Is there any sort of lock file or something that could be stuck? Thanks again!

Hi there,

The once a week setting could have made this happen. The emails could have either been sent to spam, or was blocked by your email provider.

I suggest making the email summary higher than just one week, and if it doesn’t send within a week or so, I would recommend reaching out to your email provider to see if we got stuck in their spam filters.

Best,

Joshua

Unfortunately that hasn’t fully resolved the issue. I did receive activity reports three days in a row after enabling it – but now it’s been two more days and nothing new has arrived.

I’m _absolutely certain_ this is not an issue of spam or blocked by email provider. All of our other emails come through (including activity reports when manually sent via the “Send test activity report” tool.)

Our domain appears on no blacklists, the missing emails are not in spam folders and we are the administrators of the email accounts for our domain via Google Workspaces.

Is there no possibility there’s some lock file getting stuck somewhere? That happened to use a few months ago with BackupWordpress due to our server running out of memory while it was creating the backup – but there’s been no out of memory events in the past two days to account for the missing Wordfence Activity Reports.

We also upgraded to 7.9.0 yesterday, but still today’s activity report is missing.

I wonder if there’s anything else we can try? Thanks for reading.

Hi @alamana

Thanks for letting us know.

Can you send a diagnostic report to wftest @ wordfence . com? You can find the link to do so at the top of the Wordfence > Tools > Diagnostics page. Then click on “Send Report by Email”. Please add your forum username where indicated and respond here after you have sent it.

Thanks,

Joshua

Thanks for your reply @wfjoshc. We’ve sent over the report just now.

Hi @alamana

Thanks for sending it over!

Would it be possible to let me know how you are running wp-cron ?

Thanks,

Joshua

Thanks for your reply @wfjoshc – and good question.

We run it via crontab like: */1 * * * * cd /var/www/example.org/htdocs; php /var/www/example.org/htdocs/wp-cron.php > /dev/null 2>&1

Hi @alamana

Thanks for getting back to me!

We generally recommend that instead of running?php?directly on the command line, you use a command like?curl https://example.org/wp-cron.php. This gives PHP the same environment as the website runs in, which is sometimes important. The other benefit of using curl here is that any errors logged would be logged in the same place as regular requests — though you will likely need to enable?WP_DEBUG?if you haven’t enabled it again. This may log some errors or warnings from the cron jobs, that could help finding the cause of the missing job.

Note that the?>/dev/null 2>&1?at the end of their cron job discards error messages that would appear on the CLI, though they might have still been logged somewhere else. It?is?also ok to still use that when using the curl method though, if you want the cron job not to log any output, since PHP errors will be logged based on the WP_DEBUG or error_log PHP settings.

You will probably also have to turn off Wordfence’s activity report, and turn it back on to bring the missing job back.

I hope this helps!

Thanks,

Joshua

Just to update, this seemingly resolved itself some weeks ago. Thanks for your help!