wordpress send user notification email not sent

  • Hi
    I have been having the same problem on a wordpress site now for some months.

    The problem is that though emails are generally sent from the wordpress installation OK, new user notifications are not being sent. I have verified that they are not being generated using the mail log and WP mail logging plugin. I have tried switching off any plugins that look like they interfere with the login process but no luck. I have switched on WP eror logging (to file) but I can’t see any errors being logged.

    I have even moved it to a different server and the problem remains – I still have no idea what might be causing the problem and would like some ideas about how to find the cause without having to stop the site working (i.e. changing theme and switching off all the plugins is not an option!). Surely there must be some tool/method out there for investigating this?

    Any hints on what to look for in the php logs would be useful – I understand that the wp_new_user_notification function might be the one that is being interfered with but I’m not sure how to determine this…

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  • Thread Starter thewoosh

    (@thewoosh)

    I have now identified the culprit plugin…

    It might be useful for others to know the way I came up with to pin down what plugin is causing problems without doing the whole ‘switch off all plugins and slowly switch them back on one-by-one’ thing, which is usually completely impractical (especially on a live site)…
    You do have to have access to the command line to do this though.

    0) Figure out EXACTLY what the problem is – harder than it sounds and involves lots of experimentation – in my case people were trying to sign up to a bb-press forum and though getting their activation emails they were not getting username and password emails. It was only when I was reduced to setting up their accounts manually, I realised that in fact a more general problem was that though user email notification was on, my test user emails were not getting their new user email notification – now I know what the underlying issue is and what to search for…

    1) Ascertain the likely function that is having problems – in this case I searched through the WordPress function reference here: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Function_Reference for ‘notification’ and found the likely “wp_new_user_notification” function…

    2) search the plugins directory for any occurrence of this text string to find out which plugins might be messing with it… I navigated to the plugins directory (/<web-root>/wp-content/plugins) and typed:
    # find . -type f -exec grep -i ‘wp_new_user_notification’ {} +
    …which listed all the occurrences of that string.
    In this case they were: cimy-user-extra-fields and login-with-ajax
    I tried deactivating each of these in turn and found that the emails started going out again when I deactivated the cimy user extra fields plugin.

    3) Post a question on the plugin forum explaining what happens (don’t forget to mention wordpress and plugin version) and hope that someone who knows the plugin well will come up with a solution or workaround or that the developer will fix the bug!

    Meantime I can either leave the plugin deactivated so that new users can sign up or figure out a way to get this plugin working appropriately as it is important to the function of my site!

    Hope this is useful to someone else…
    theWoosh

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