Please excuse the recent behaviour of this WordPress site. You have likely heard nothing by email from it since March 2 until yesterday and then some of you may have received flurries of duplicate messages. New subscribers probably received no confirmation email nor password reset notices. This post may not be delivered to subscribers. I’m working on correcting the problem but there seem to be multiple issues and it is proving difficult to isolate the causes:
- starting March 2, every notice failed with an error “Could not instantiate mail function”
- appears to have been resolved, more or less, by adding a second MX record and revising the priority of the first in the sqlitetoolsforrootsmagic.com domain – that just seems weird
- resending notices from the WP Mail Logging plugin has revealed a bug causing them to multiply; the plugin is no longer actively supported
- resending notices such as comments on blog posts fail because the address (From:) wordpress@sqlitetoolsforrootsmagic.com is “invalid”, despite being valid until March 2; must be an issue with the Hostinger mail server. Resending notices from the Forum uses a different, valid (From:) address (but get multiplied)
- phpmail() function is said to be unreliable; Hostinger is recommending the use of a SMTP plugin which I am looking into.
I may lose the log of blocked notices or never get to resending ones that should have gone to you, such as password resets.
I think I have resolved the more serious issue:
– notifications from the Blog and Pages should now be getting sent more reliably after setting up a SMTP mailer plugin. (but my suspicion was reinforced that the root cause was from changes in either or both the Hostinger mail service and DNS)
Resending notices without them multiplying remains a secondary problem which I will deal with later.
Also discovered that the Ultimate Members plugin was incompletely or incorrectly installed some months ago when searching for a more challenging user registration process. Not sure what its impact has been – might have blocked access to the front page for a while – but is now resolved (I hope).
I have never gotten an email from this site.
I’d recommend subscribing to the Entries and Comments feeds with an RSS browser extension – see the Meta menu. I don’t think I can solve the email notification problems without paying for a mail service.