willemb2

@wysija,

I just discovered that a Firefox plugin: Adblocker Ultimate was blocking it. If I disable it for my site and reload, the Help button appears.

Thanks!

STRATO support checked Solution 2, but the database connection is setup correctly. From phpinfo:
PDO Driver for MySQL enabled
Client API version 5.5.52
Directive Local Value Master Value
pdo_mysql.default_socket /tmp/mysql.sock /tmp/mysql.sock

Here’s another thread with 6 people having the same problem:
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/cant-connect-databse/
Unfortunately it has been closed and marked as solved by @mailpoet without publishing the solution that has been exchanged by e-mail with the OP ??

I’m one step further, I think: someone advised me to disable all other plugins while installing MailPoet 3. After doing that, I still got the 500 Internal Server Error, but now MailPoet 3 does appear in the installed plugins list. However, I cannot activate it. The error message (in Dutch) says “could not connect to the database” and contains a link to this page.
Solution 1 does not work. In our case DB_HOST = rdbms.strato.de, if I change that to 127.0.0.1 the whole site goes down with a “could not connect to the database” error.
For I Solution 2 you need access to php.ini, but I do not have that. As I wrote above, this is a pre-installed WordPress. MailPoet 2 runs without (databes-) errors.

@MaiPoet,

I have looked all over our WordPress Dashboard, but I cannot find a setting to “enable Debug Mode”. In our case WordPress came pre-installed by the web-hosting provider. I found a plugin called Debug Mode, but that also fails to install, in this case without any error message.

In the meantime we got MailPoet 3 running on a test website at another provider. We immediately ran into the problem described here. The workaround given there looks awful in our newsletters. We will not use MailPoet 3 until this is fixed. I really don’t understand the “upgrade to 3” nagging while such an essential feature of MailPoet 2 is still missing in MailPoet 3.

@bruna,

Have you checked the Minimum and Recommended Requirements for MailPoet 3?

1. I have WordPress 4.9.2
2. I have lots of images in my media gallery, so I assume the uploads folder is writable.
3. PHP Version is 7.1.13
4 and 5 are beyond my knowledge level. WordPress is pre-installed by our hosting provider STRATO. I do not have access on that level. All I can say is that MailPoet 2 and all other plugins work fine.

When you say “worked” do you mean that it worked with Postie? So if I send a picture from a smartphone that is held in portrait position (EXIF Orientation parameter value 6 = “right, top” aka “rotate 90 CW”) with Postie, will it appear in portrait position in my WP post?

I had not even tried “Image Rotation Repair” because the plugin page says “Tested up to: 3.2.1”. I will try it when I find the time.

Like so many WP plugins, the Image Rotation Fixer has not been updated for over 2 years. The author created it as an internship-project. He never replied to any problem report on the plugin’s support forum https://www.ads-software.com/support/plugin/image-rotation-repair. The last positive rating was 1 year 8 months ago. Still people keep recommending it ??

I have never found an alternative that works with recent WP versions.

IMHO the EXIF “Orientation” parameter is a disaster. Maybe it is useful within smartphone apps, but as soon as the image leaves the smartphone it causes nothing but trouble.

Hi Bruna, I had seen that. But as I understand it this only works for the one-time welcome E-mail. And another problem is that this way the PDF is wide open on the Internet. We want to send information that is (a bit) confidential.
This is a major drawback of MailPoet.

Sometimes I get the idea that MailPoet is designed from previous century ideas about bandwith and traffic. At the “Send with..” settings I read “We suggest 70 emails per hour to be safe”. With another program I’m using (GroupMail) I send over 2000 per hour, with multiple MB’s of attachments each, without problems.

I’m not the OP, but for us that would not work. The PDF’s we want to send our members are not top secret, but we still want to keep them out of Googles greedy hands. Also people from the 50+ generations are used to PDF attachments and are more reluctant to click or tick links in E-mails.

What I would expect from those utilities is to actually flip the image based on the EXIF Orientation parameter. If I edit an image in the media library there are buttons to flip the image manually and they seem to actually recode the image data to flip it. So somewhere deep in WordPress there is the code to do that.
I downloaded some images that have been posted using Postie. Most of them still contain EXIF data includingthe Orientation parameter, but only if it had the value ‘Top left’. I have seen two examples where the original had Orientation: ‘Right top’. Those two still have all EXIF data except Orientation. So when images enter the media library there is a process that actually looks at this parameter and takes action based on the value. We’re almost there, I would say. But I’m not a software developer…
I tried several plugins: with Image Rotation Fixer I cannot upload pictures from recent Sony Xperia smartphones if they were taken in portrait mode.
iOS Images Fixer works, but – as the name suggests – only for images from iPhones/iPads. Apparently it looks at another parameter.
Fix Image Rotation did not work at all.

I had assumed your plugin was looking at the EXIF Orientation property, which Sony and Samsung are using as well. iPhones are only 10% of the market here in The Netherlands currently. So I will have to look for another solution.

Just sent you an example of an image that caused the HTTP error.

When trying to reproduce the problem I found that it only occurs with pictures taken in portrait mode with a Sony Xperia Z5 Compact. When I try to upload those, the progress bar goes to 100%, but then I get just “HTTP error” with a red bar in front of it. No further codes or details. The image does not appear in the media library. With other images there is no problem. When I disable the plugin, I also have no problem uploading pictures from the Z5 Compact. Weird.
I have uploaded several images with the “Orientation – Right top” EXIF property from non-iOS camera’s, but your plugin doesn’t seem correct those: “Woohoo! You don’t have any broken images!”

In my case https://www.werun4all this problem goes away (don’t know if I can call it solved) if I go to WordPress Settings > General and choose for Time-zone “Amsterdam” instead of UTC+2.

The UTC+2 setting was pre-set by our hosting provider STRATO. During summer daylight savings time Amsterdam = UTC+2 but apparently it works different for Postie. Only if I use “Amsterdam” and “Ignore Email date: Yes” the posts-by-email get posted immediately with the time they arrived.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by willemb2. Reason: typo
• This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by willemb2.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by willemb2. Reason: fix URL

Sorry, I should have reported here that after my original post the same problem emerged with other plugins, on multiple WP blogs I am involved with, at multiple hosting providers. So it is not a MailPoet specific problem.
Something must have changed in a WP update after 4.3 . I have seen several solutions on this and other forums, but none of them is undisputed and my knowledge of Unix server systems is too limited to judge.
A manual download and install of 2.7.1 did work without my settings and newsletters getting lost.

That’s a shame, but thanks for the swift reply. BTW the link in my original post doesn’t work anymore, we just went live.