As some of you may know I work with a bunch of cool librarians on the Libraries Interact blog. Not being in the library world much these days I predominantly contribute to the blog by doing system administration and other tasks like upgrades of the WordPress software. I have also been recently working with the group on getting a new theme ready.
Today we had an interesting issue that took some investigation to solve.
Essentially we had an issue where a user who had lost their password couldn’t use the lost password feature. Anyone who tried recieved an error message suggesting that the mail() function was disabled by our host. The truly strange thing was that other emails, such as user registrations, SpamKarma reports, and comments were all coming through.
During my investigations I cam across this post in the WordPress support forums. What it suggested was that the lost password emails are being sent under the address wordpress@your-domain. Investigating the way our account was set up showed that we didn’t have this address configured.
What this made me think is that perhaps our host is doing some proactive spam prevention and stopping emails being sent through their servers that don’t have addresses configured in their clients accounts. This would explain why this email wasn’t being sent, and yet others were. The other emails were being sent out under the address we have configured in the admin section of WordPress, which is a valid account.
A quick configuration change, making a forwarder for this address to our main administration account, fixed the issue.
January 30, 2008 at 2:51 pm
[...] Clever Corey worked out this solution when we discovered that librariesinteract.info authors who used “lost your password” were not getting any email notification sent back. Thanks Corey. Print this [...]