Account activation email not sending

jrmartin · 2022-08-19 14:43:53

I’ve tried to add another user to Wandering Italy, but the account activation email isn’t sending. I’ve contacted my host, A2 hosting, and they’ve asked, “
Can you please let us know the mail settings you have used in your CMS? Such as hostname, username and port?” I haven’t a clue where to look for this information. Can somebody help?

james

phiw13 · 2022-08-20 05:48:11

This probably does not answer your question (as asked, I am not sure where to look either), but what –if any– settings do you have on the Preferences panel > Admin for email: there are two relevant entries:

SMTP envelope sender address
Send login details from this email address

I always use an address that directly belongs to the site (assuming domain.com is the domain, and email like me[at]domain.com) for those two fields.

gaekwad · 2022-08-21 11:32:51

jrmartin wrote #333811:

“Can you please let us know the mail settings you have used in your CMS? Such as hostname, username and port?”

The current Textpattern uses the local mail transfer agent (e.g. Sendmail or Postfix, etc). If it can’t talk to the MTA then it throws an error (in my experience, at least), so if you’re getting a green light for the part that says it’s worked, the problem may sit with the MTA itself.

jrmartin · 2022-08-21 14:05:48

So I entered the email address “info@wanderingitaly.com” for the “SMTP envelope sender address”
and “Send login details from this email address” and got this reply from support:

Upon checking the logs for the mails sent from your account “info@wanderingitaly.com”, I could see that mails are getting blocked with the error “550 5.7.1 [SHF] Message rejected”. This error indicates that your message has been blocked because we suspect you may be impersonating a legitimate sender inappropriately.

In this case, I found that there is a mismatch in ‘from address’ and ‘envelope address’ for the emails originating from your account. The from address is “James Martin <info@wanderingitaly.com> X-Mailer: Textpattern Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=‘UTF-8’ “ and envelope address is “info@wanderingitaly.com”.

I don’t know where the name in the from address is coming from.

gaekwad · 2022-08-21 14:32:23

jrmartin wrote #333821:

I don’t know where the name in the from address is coming from.

Check your Textpattern user account email address.

jrmartin · 2022-08-21 14:35:48

That’s it. But what can I do, delete it?

Bloke · 2022-08-21 15:43:52

I’ve not tried it because for some reason my host is ignoring that setting (I’m running a hybrid Textpattern version that might explain it) but can you set the Send login details from this email address and/or SMTP envelope sender address to:

James Martin <info@wanderingitaly.com>

Not sure if it lets you do that and uses it verbatim, or if it strips out anything that isn’t an email address.

jrmartin · 2022-08-21 16:24:34

can you set the Send login details from this email address and/or SMTP envelope sender address to:

James Martin <info@wanderingitaly.com>...

I set them both that way and it didn’t send. If I use just the email address I get a bounce from something called MailChannels the host uses. If I click their button for “this is not spam” nothing happens.

Bloke · 2022-08-21 22:35:01

That’s frustrating. Sorry this is causing issues. I’m fresh out of ideas here. Hopefully someone else can suggest something.

bici · 2022-08-21 22:48:37

jrmartin wrote #333823:

That’s it. But what can I do, delete it?

you should be able to change the real name and emaill address and then SAVE the changes.
ADMIN > USERS> ACCOUNT

In your case perhaps you could try changing REAL NAME from James Martin to Info.

PS is your login account id a one word string?

Last edited by bici (2022-08-21 22:49:11)

hidalgo · 2022-08-22 17:46:21

jrmartin wrote #333821:

I don’t know where the name in the from address is coming from.

I’m guessing you’re using PHP 8?

This looks like the same broken ‘from address’ email header issue I’ve reported: here and here also

The from address is “James Martin <info@wanderingitaly.com> X-Mailer: Textpattern Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=‘UTF-8’ “ and envelope address is “info@wanderingitaly.com”.

The ‘from address’ header should be just the email address only and not contain the name or X-Mailer: Textpattern Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=‘UTF-8’ part, which is where the mismatch with the (correct) envelope address is happening.

The only solution I’ve found so far is to roll back to PHP 7.

Bloke · 2022-08-22 22:08:47

Ahhhh wait. Yeah maybe that’s it. Thanks for the nudge, hidalgo. I thought it was only a com,_connect issue but maybe it’s core, oops.

Just reread the reply from the host and they clearly state: The from address is “James Martin <info@wanderingitaly.com> X-Mailer: Textpattern Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=‘UTF-8’ “.

So it certainly looks as if there’s a missing quote or backslash-n or something, and php 8 is stricter about how it handles the field encoding.

This needs investigation.

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#1 2022-08-19 14:43:53