How To Fix WordPress Blog Not Sending Emails

This tutorial assumes that you’re currently running a self-hosted wordpress installation on a server running CPanel 11 with the PHP mail() function disabled. Some web hosting companies do this to impede email spammers but it tends to also affect legitimate users. Without this function, plug-ins such as Subscribe To Comments and Contact Form 7 will not work BUT there’s a quick fix to this.

Disclaimer: This tutorial is provided as it is. I shall not be held responsible should anything go wrong along the way. The following information worked perfectly well for me and will hopefully work for you too. Having CPanel makes it a lot easier

STEP I

How To Create An Email Address Via CPanel

Create a a new email address via CPanel or your web host’s admin area.

Fill in the necessary data in the fields below

1. The first half of your email address example: beachblondes
2. The domain for your email. Leave as it is if you don’t have several domains hosted on your account.
3. Choose a good password with letters and numbers
4. Repeat your password
5. Set the amount of disk space you want to allocate to your new email address.
6. Click Create.

Take note of your email address and password as it will come in handy for the configuration of the wordpress plug-in that will get your wordpress installation to start sending emails.

After creating your email address, look at the configuration settings and take note of Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP Host) name and port.

STEP II

How To Configure WP-Mail SMTP

Download, Install and Activate WP-Mail SMTP plug-in.

In your wordpress dashboard under Settings, click on Email. Let’s assume that the email we created above was “beachblondes@blondes.com”

Fill in the setup page as shown below.

Once you are done setting things up, click update options and wait for the page to reload. When it’s done reloading, scroll down to the and of the page and test your configuration.

After clicking the “Send Test” button, the page will reload again and display information similar to the image below.

If the email was successfully sent, Bool True will show as above if the opposite is the case Bool False will be shown. Also if the email was successfully sent, it should be in your inbox.

In the case whereby you get a Bool False message, checking the message above will be able to tell you where the problem is. In most cases, changing Authentication and Encryption settings could help or you might have filled in your username and password wrongly or the SMTP Host and Port are wrongly configured.

Either way, the log file above will tell you what’s wrong.

All that’s left is for you to make sure that your Subscribe To Comment plug-in is now sending out notifications. Simply sign out of your wordpress dashboard and leave a test comment on your blog using a fictitious name. Don’t forget to tick the “Notify me of follow-up comments via e-mail” button.

If you’ve got comment moderation activated, log-in back to your wordpress dashboard and approve the comment. Log-out once more and leave another comment on that same post using another fictitious name. Approve that comment then check your email address to find the comment notification email .

In my next post, I’ll be writing about how to get Contact Form 7 to work with PHP mail() function disabled.

Feel free to leave a quick feedback as to if this worked for you or not.

Cheers !

Credits: A huge thanks goes out to Mario J Vargas of Anstrey.com. His tutorial “How to Send Email with WordPress from GoDaddy (Windows Hosting)” helped me fix this problem on my own server and thus inspired me to write what I hope is a detailed description of how I went about it on my own server .

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