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Lacking email notifications

I have a most peculiar problem with email notifications (Vanilla 2.1.8). Each day "the system" only sends notifications for 7 comments, then it stops totally - until next evening. Then again notifications for 7 comments etc.

Here is a little statistics for the past three days:

31.03 - kl. 21:07-22:58 - comment #141-147
01.04 - kl. 21:38-22:36 - comment #173-179
02.04 - kl. 21:47-22:00 - comment #211-217

Can anyone figure out where the problem is? Is it Vanilla or is it a problem with the web host?

The plugin EMailSubscribe is installed and enabled (and "Subscribe ALL users to ALL categories..." has been activated).

Can I change anything in the Forum Settings (or in a program file) that will make email notifications work properly?

Any advice will be most appreciated.

Comments

  • You don't need that plugin, that functionality is in the core.

    grep is your friend.

  • Thanks for your reply, @x00 , I have now disabled the plugin (as I have tried earlier), but unfortunately it makes no difference. I have just posted a new comment but the other users get no email notification. It is now around 6:45 am here so I believe I have to wait another 14 hours before the function wakes up again - for a short while.

  • It is dependent on the user's notification settings. You may only have 7 people that enabled these notifications.

    Email notification are not sent out through cron or periodically. They are sent out near the time the events occur.

    I don't know what statistic we are looking at, but it looks more like request/access logs.

    You should note the transactional mail is a very specialist thing. Many email host or even webhost want nothing to do with it. For instance if you use gmail to send transactional mail you will be shut down pretty quick.

    You may be getting locked out of sending emails, simply becuase you host want to avoid being used to spam other people. Anything that send lot of email to lot of people in rapid succession might trigger this. Therefore use an SMTP service, that accepts transactional mail.

    grep is your friend.

  • Yes, you may be right. However, we have been using the same host for more than 5 years with a Vanilla 1 installation and there all users have had notifications for every comment posted. I wonder what it could be in the Vanilla 2 program code that could "offend" the web host to cause a 24 h waiting period - and how to circumvent such restrictions.

    All users (including my own test-UserID) have checked all options for receiving email notifications. The pattern for all of us is the statistics described above. I have simply listed form my own email inbox when the first and last notification has been sent and which comments they are related to.

    The only email services I have available are hosted by the same company so I don't know how to test if using another SMTP service would solve my problem.

  • I took contact to our web host (one.com) and described the problem to them. They explained that the problem could be that the forum by default sends out mails from a non-existing mail account (noreply@yourdomain.com). They have a limit of 20 mails per day from such non-registered account. The solution was that I registeret a mail account (admin@yourdomain.com) and put that as the sender in our Vanilla forum (Dashboard: Outgoing Email). After that everything works like a dream - and all users get their notifications!

  • Glad you got it sorted.

    grep is your friend.

  • hgtonighthgtonight ∞ · New Moderator

    @KristianB said:

    They explained that the problem could be that the forum by default sends out mails from a non-existing mail account (noreply@yourdomain.com).

    Now I feel really bad, since I ran into that same issue on my original Vanilla forum, excepting I didn't get any email from non-existent addresses.

    Glad you got it sorted!

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