Email is not being sent to new members

Drupal relies on a properly configured smtp server on your host. Does your host have one? What environment are you on (shared hosting, local linux desktop, WAMP, XAMP setup, etc.)?

Also, have you set the email address in admin/settings?

Sometimes the emails can get blocked by a spam filter, but making sure you have smtp installed and properly configured is the first step.

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Growing Venture Solutions
Drupal Implementation and Support in Denver, CO

I have the same problem as Freespirit.
My user doesnt receive any email password.
Have you solved your problem freespirit?What is the answer then?
There is a module for auto login:(http://drupal.org/node/34309).

I had the same problem and the smtp module fixed it instantly.

I have the EXACT same problem, my email used to work great. All of a sudden emails are not sent out to new members.

It might be an SMTP issue, just wht do I tell my host to do to fix this?

Or what do I do?

joelfarris,

I did what you advised and sent my self an email via the contact form, and I didn't get the mail. It seems that doesn't work either.

However, my log did say "mail blah blah blah". So log does show that an email was sent from drupal, but the mail itself did not arrive.

I hope this clarifies things so i can fix this problem.

Contact form emails work.
I installed the smtp module just to make sure, and the test emails work from there...
but with and without the smtp module enabled, new user registration emails are not arriving...

I don't see any problems in the logs at all, it's not getting marked as spam (I'm checking) the stuff simply isn't showing up.
Fresh install of the latest drupal, admin email is set...
I have no idea why this isn't working, seems very strange.

*** some editing after more poking around...
It seems that if I send a test email to myself at my domain where drupal is installed, it's all good... but if I try to send a test email to a gmail or yahoo account, no go....

makes no sense, I can send email to gmail and yahoo via a regular mail client using smtp so it shouldn't be an issue to send from drupal?

First let me say, that I'm new to this site, so correct me if I'm writing to a wrong place. Honestly, I'm a little confused about all the bugs/issues and stuff, but surely I'll get hang later. I can only speak about the Drupal 4.7.3 version, which is running on the site Naturista.cz. I didn't install this, nor am I able to set up a testing installation, I'm just helping a friend with site-administration. So take my info in this light, please.

To the subject... Recently we had quite similar problem - all the mail from Drupal failed to be sent all of a sudden, without any change done. New-password requests said something like "Unable to send mail, contact admin" and logged an error into watchdog, while all the other e-mail cases (new user registration, site-wide and personal contact-forms, new private message notification) reported a success (and logged the same in the watchdog, where applies), but the email wasn't sent either. The real trouble with such a situation is, that the problem also affects the site-wide contact form (the contact module) used for feedback to admin, so users can't report the unsuccessfull registrations, and with the logs clean, admin doesn't notice anything for a long time.

The facts are:
- All the mails were blocked by the ISP (later they confirmed disallowing the mail() funcion for us).
- The reason they did it for was "outgoing spam" caused most probably by forwarding messages from site-wide contact form (which really were spam mostly).
- Drupal 4.7.3 lacks of any error-detection on sending e-mails (except new-password request), making you think that mails are being sent (and then dropped elsewhere).

First about the error-detection: The case was, that the mail() function didn't do anything, and returned FALSE. In the new-password mailing this lead to error-message to both the user, and admin log, which is correct behavior. All the other mail-sendings (list above) in 4.7.3 contain absolutely no check on the mail() return value, just displaying a fixed "success" message even when not true.

I've patched the user.module and contact.module files, where I took the check from new-password part, and included similar checks everywhere a mail is being sent, with errors reported to both user and admin-log. After uploading this to the live site, the result immediately confirmed that mail() returned FALSE always. (That was how I found out about the ISP's blocking.)

If anyone is interested, I can send the patched files on request (or should I upload it somewhere, although I absolutely don't know how to change headers or extract the patches from full-length texts, or what else to do for a correct patch distribution?) Note that it's also a good idea to have a custom error-message (via localization possibly) for site-wide contact form errors, with admin's mail address in it, to enable emergency contact from unhappy users in that case.

About the spam-issue: After this experience, I consider it very risky to use the site-wide contact form for feedback! On a middle-popular website like ours, quite a lot of messages are submitted by anonymous users, most of them being pure spam. There's no cure to this, since the feedback must be open for everyone, in case of log-in troubles for instance. All the messages are immediately sent out as e-mail, detected as spam by the ISP, and oops - mail blocked, ruining user-registration also. (The ISP - ours at least - doesn't care about the fact that it goes to our own address; plus it's even worse when the users (possibly being robots!) check the "Send me a copy" box, making the same message being sent twice, one to the given "from" address, which is not necessarily their own!) The flood-check in Drupal (3 messages per hour) is probably insufucient measure in this case: many feedbacks versus very few other e-mails from system give still a clearly spam-winning score.

So, we were forced to do something about the feedback, before they re-enabled the mail() for us. The solution I've found is to redirect site-wide contact form to the private messages of some user (admin typically), thus avoiding any possible e-mail/spam trouble with forwarding the non-trusted messages from anonyms. With the e-mail notification about unread messages enabled, the admin knows soon anyway, and in addition the site-bug-reports may not be affected by third parties, as e-mails often are.

I did this patch also, contact me if you're interested. (Multiple feedback categories still working, but accepting just one user-name instead of multiple mail-addresses as target, removed "send me a copy" box, and removed auto-reply, requiring the privatemsg module. Admin gets private messages from Anonymous user, with return-mail inserted in the text.)

I don't know, whether these issues are being sloved elsewhere or in latest Drupal distributions, but I seem unable to find any similar help (even though reading the search-results took me hours). Please correct me if I'm wrong, or if I should post this elsewhere/in other form. I hope this post might be still useful to somebody.

EDIT: I just discovered, that there's probably no private-contact possible on this site - I checked the contact-form box in my profile, but still it doesn't work (let alone no private-messages here). That's bad, because I don't like my e-mail published, for the spam-reasons. Just for this case one exception: bewesoft (at) centrum (dot) cz

I've had similar problems, but I've confirmed that mine is related only to AOL email addresses - as others have pointed out above. I've contacted them to see what they can/will do about this. All email from the drupal system - new accounts, password resets, user contact forms, etc. just disappear when they go to aol accounts?? All the users (about 30) have checked their spam filters, etc. to no avail.

Hi,

So I had the same problem on my private dedicated server and Drupal 5.X installed. I tried tweaking every possible setting on my server thru WHM and Putty/ssh and nothing worked.

I finally resolved the problem by adding this module:

http://drupal.org/project/smtp ---> Drupal 4.6 and 4.7

http://drupal.org/node/95819 ---> Drupal 5.X

INSTALL INSTRUCTIONS FOR SMTP.MODULE

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1. Copy smtp.module and smtp.info files to your Drupal modules/ folder.

2. Login at site administrator.

3. Activate smtp.module on the administer->modules page.

4. Fill in required settings on the administer->Site configuration->SMTP support page.

5. Enjoy.

I did exactly as per the installation notes and now everything works just fine.

I have many other scripts installed on my server and all mail forms are working well, but Drupal wasn't until I installed that SMTP Authentication module for the corresponding Drupal version, for instance, 5.X.

This problem was repeating on every single site that used Drupal script on my server.

Drupal is great, but that is an important point to fix in the core of the script in my opinion.

Best regards,

D-A-R-K

Setup a simple test. Create an account in your favorite free email services. Myself I used gmail. Then walk through a registration process or any basic service you wish to test in which part of the service involves sending a member email.

What I discovered - Increase in False Positives for Spam

What I found was my mail from my server was being marked as spam. This means one needs to begin to think like a spam filter in order to get your mail to go through.

Are You Alone
Search on "False Positives" AND gmail. Take a look at the horror stories. Business closing since customer's emails are lost, since the mail is drops into the spam folder and are never forwarded to the POP accounts. Banks emails are being dropped resulting in loan defaults. People loosing domain names since notices are not being received. This is not only gmail, which is a great email service. All the email providers are increasing the filtering because that's what the we the customers have asked for.

Some Guideposts

- Know how the filter think. For example here is a list of rules that spamassasin uses: http://spamassassin.apache.org/tests_3_2_x.html

- Test Using Email Providers: Sign up for a few accounts and then test your emails.

- It is not Obvious: So here I was, using the word 'Test 1' in the topic for the email. This is on the filters list. Awckkkk

- SPF - Know how to build your SPF file inside your DNS record.
Solution: This is what I had to do to get through the gmail filter

"v=spf1 ip4:55.100.450.21 mx mx:aspmx.l.google.com mx:alt1.aspmx.l.google.com mx:alt2.aspmx.l.google.com mx:aspmx2.googlemail.com mx:aspmx3.googlemail.com ~all" [TTL=3600]

Note: I have included the IP address for my drupal server at the beginning plus my email servers at google.

- This still did not solve my problems. I'm still getting blocked for some other emails. You have to look at the entire email. Header, content, ...

- The filters will continue to evolve, thus retest periodically.

In my install of drupal 4.7 on a lamp-box, no e-mails from my site were sent at all, even though succesful dispatches were mentioned in the drupal-event log. I tried different stuff and ended up installing the smtp-module to resolve the problem, but got an error message stating that a mail function in the devel-module had the same name as a function in the smtp-module. So after dismantling the devel-module and deleting the files from my server... all e-mails are being dispatched again, and I'm a really happy camper.

--
My girlfriend says that I need help (Therapy?)

I was having similar problems: testing registrations using email addresses on the same domain as my Drupal worked just fine. Other emails failed to go out.

I installed SMTP module, activated it, and verified the settings by sending test emails to all sorts of emails on other domains. However, registering using one of those successfully tested email addresses fails. Is there something else that needs to be done to tell Drupal to use SMTP module as its sendmail proxy for registration?

I have set up a machine for testing, and I want to be able to send email from Drupal to localhost accounts as well as to the outside. Here's the basic configuration:

- Centos 5x
- Drupal 6.10
- SMTP Auth module ON (phpmailer is included)
- postfix running

My postfix is working - I can use it to send to localhost accounts as well as to Yahoo accounts. BUT, I can not get Drupal and postfix to work together. The test emails (when creating new users or when activating the SMTP module) produce errors:

# warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to localhost.localdomain:25 (Connection refused) in /sites/all/modules/smtp/phpmailer/class.smtp.php on line 122.

# warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: Name or service not known in /sites/all/modules/smtp/phpmailer/class.smtp.php on line 122.

# warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to :25 (php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: Name or service not known) in /sites/all/modules/smtp/phpmailer/class.smtp.php on line 122.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Cliff

I'm getting this error when I try to register an user:
warning: mail() [function.mail]: SMTP server response: 550 Authentication is required for relay in
can anybody help ?