[Forum] Error Sending Emails

[WebGuy75903]

We've been getting Internal Server 500 Errors whenever we try to send out emails. This is a new development that just started happening about two or three weeks ago. I called our hosting company (GoDaddy), and asked them what changes might have happened. They were insistent that nothing was wrong on their end, and that nothing had changed. They said that the problem had to be with a configuration within our vBulletin software. So I verified with them that our settings were correct (they are). In addition to that, I just upgraded our forum software this evening to 4.1.4, and tried it again. Still got an Internal Server 500 error.

As an additional test, I tried it once more, but selected the "Test Message" option at the top, which doesn't actually send out the email. That piece worked like a charm. So I am at a loss. I want to believe it's GoDaddy, but not sure at this point, since they tell me everything is okay on their end. Any ideas? Please help, as our site owner really wants to send out some information to the users. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide...

WebGuy

[WebGuy75903]

As a quick follow-up. It worked for about 2 hours last Thursday, but did generate a few individual errors. The errors I got was the following:

Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to tcp://relay-hosting.secureserver.net:25 (Connection timed out) in [path]/includes/class_mail.php on line 743

Hope that is useful information. Thanks again...WebGuy

[Hawk2]

SMTP Email select no as you have not set up SMTP with your host or have not done it right

[WebGuy75903]

Preliminary testing on the solution suggested by Hawk2, all seems fine. Don't want to call this fixed yet, as I was able to get things working with a Preliminary test the other way, too. The issue really came about when we tried to send emails to all 2500+ users. So I've asked the site owner to come up with something to send to every user so I can test it out ASAP. Hopefully this evening/tomorrow morning, I'll have something to send out, and will be able to say one way or the other whether this was the fix or not.

Thanks, Hawk2.

[WebGuy75903]

Not sure what happened, but I got some information from the site owner to send out last night. I did so, making sure it was being send using the phpmail() function feature, as opposed to SMTP. It processed through with absolutely no errors at all. However, having performed that email send out last night at approximately 10:00pm Eastern Time, it is now 7:30am, and I haven't received the email, nor have any others that I have found so far.

So where did I go wrong? Thanks for your help...

WebGuy

[Trevor Hannant]

If you enable email logging in AdminCP >Settings > Options > Error Handling & Logging, do you see the emails getting logged when you send them?

[WebGuy75903]

Hi Trevor.

I turned on email logging, and after going through another email sending, it said it FAILED. Here is what it supplied:

FAILED
Thu, 07 Jul 2011 14:45:14 -0700
To: [email protected]
Subject: Something Something Something
From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected]
Return-Path:[email protected]
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: vBulletin Mail via PHP
Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2011 14:45:17

Thanks again for your assistance...

WebGuy

[Hawk2]

what are using for your SMTP Host

[Steve Machol]

That means that vB sent the email to the server but the server failed. The next step is to check the server email logs to see what happened.

[WebGuy75903]

Thanks, Steve.

That was pretty much my thinking as well - Just needed to "go through those hoops", so I could definitively tell our hosting company that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the code itself. The problem has now been discovered, and we are working with our hosting company to get things resolved so that this is no longer an issue. I appreciate everyone's help.

RESOLUTION: The issue was in using GoDaddy's shared hosting service (usually the cheapest option). They limit everyone to 1000 emails per day. As you can imagine, a site with over 5000 users (over 2500 of those users opting to have emails sent to them), lots of users opt to receive emails when they get PM's, and you have new user registrations that require an email be sent. By the end of a given day, that 1000 email threshold is almost (if it hasn't already) met. GoDaddy will no longer allow this email limit to be raised (they used to in the past). The only way to get this raised is to go with a different hosting plan (they have suggested the Virtual Dedicated Server - Economy plan).

Thanks again for the assistance...

WebGuy