Thread

Hi, I have been using Freeform successfully on client’s site for more than a year. In the last 3 weeks it has stopped sending notification emails but still records the data on the backend.

I am hosting with 1and1.co.uk. My freeform code is:

{exp:freeform:form form_name="general_enquiry" required="first_name|last_name|email|comments" notify="[email protected]" template="general_enquiry" return="contact-us/thank-you"}
                    <table width="440" border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="1" class="reservations" align="center">
                      <tr> 
                        <td class="label">First Name</td>
                        <td><input type="text" name="first_name" class="input" tabindex="1" /></td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr> 
                        <td class="label">Surname Name</td>
                        <td><input type="text" name="last_name" class="input" tabindex="2" /></td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr> 
                        <td class="label">Email<span class="note"></span></td>
                        <td><input type="text" name="email" class="input" tabindex="3" /></td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr> 
                        <td class="label">Phone
<span class="note">(e.g. +27 53 781 9234)</span></td>
                        <td><input type="text" name="phone" class="input" tabindex="4" /></td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr> 
                        <td class="label">Comment</td>
                        <td><textarea name="comments" cols="30" rows="10" class="input" tabindex="5" ></textarea></td>
                      </tr>
                      <tr> 
                        <td class="label">Please type the characters you see in the image before submitting</td>
                        <td>{captcha}
<input class="forum_text_input captcha" type="text" name="captcha" value="" /></td>
                      </tr>

                      <tr class="no-dots"> 
                        <td align="center"></td><td><input type="submit" value="Submit Enquiry" name="submit"></td>
                      </tr>
        </table>
{/exp:freeform:form}

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

P.S. Have posted on the Freeform forum as well.

This will probably be moved from Tech Support as it’s more a 3rd party issue than anything I’m guessing but the first thing to check would be can you send e-mail using the Communicate area of your admin panel?

As Freeform uses the exact same method to send form submissions as the standard built-in ExpressionEngine Communicate module then this is what I would check first. If that works then you can start looking at other things such as code on your templates etc… although if you say it has been working for the past 3 years and suddenly stopped working then I would personally suspect something on the server side more than anything.

Have you changed any of the Freeform code or module settings or anything like that in the past 3 years? Also have you changed any settings in your setup around the same time as this all stopped working?

One other thing would be to make sure the e-mails aren’t for some reason going into a junk folder or something like that. Sometimes (if using a server spam correction filter and even to an extent junk filters in e-mail programmes) rules can change and e-mails that didn’t usually go into a junk folder may now be doing so.

Hope that helps a bit.

Best wishes,

Mark

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the quick reply.

The tricky thing is that I can send email through the Communication Area no problem - which is why I am kind of ruling out any server changes (not that I would know where to start looking).

Also, nothing has changed in the Freeform code and the mails are not going to spam. I am stumped at the moment.

Thanks again for the response.

Just a follow up on this. I have upgraded the latest versions of EE and freeform and neither seem to be sending automated messages.

I have a member registration area where users are meant to be sent their activation link via email, but this is not happening either. Once again, I can send happily from within the Comms tab, but the system (through user reg or through freeform) won’t send emails on its own.

Any help would be great. Thanks.

be-human, when you say member registration area, are you using just EE or did you also purchase the Solspace User module?

Hi Sue,

I am using the normal member registration on one part of the site and the FreeForm module from Solspace on another part of the site. Neither are sending mail to subscribers or notifying my client that forms have been completed. Kelsy from Solspace logged into my account and confirmed all was 100% with the Freeform setup and found no errors when sending mail from the control panel (with debugging on) but no email gets sent.

She suggest that I bring my problem back here to the EE forums. Any ideas?

Let’s make sure you can send regular mail via the Communicate tab. Be sure to turn on email debugging. What error message, if any, do you get?

Hi Ingmar,

I received an error using PHP Mail and then changed to SendMail and that works fine from the Comms tab. I get the following message:

Debugging Message
Status: 0.
Your message has been successfully sent using sendmail

So now, from the control panel, it appears I can send messages, but the Freeform module from Solspace does not work. It does not notify people that forms have been submitted. Also, when a new member registers, it should send them a confirmation email but this functionality is also not working. Any advice would be appreciated.

be-human,

Have you got a Return email address for auto-generated emails in your email preferences?

Hi John,

I do have a Return email address set for auto-generated emails.

What about swapping out the value of where the notifications are going to. Perhaps a gmail or yahoo mail account?

This doesn´t appear to help either. I just did another small test which may shed some light on the situation:

If I select ´sendmail´ as the email configuration and use my own email address as the sender´s address then the communicate tab lets me send emails successfully. However, if I write the actual email address of my client (the default return address) then I get an error saying ´cannot open socket´.

I tried the same test using PHP mail as the config and the same thing happens. Is this normal?

I tried the same test using PHP mail as the config and the same thing happens. Is this normal?

No, that’s not normal.

You may have sorted this already - but I had a similar problem and what’s causing it is that you have not included both the ‘name’ and ‘email’ fields from your freeform fields. These are required by freeform to send the email. Simply changing the name of one of your fields to ‘name’ would do the trick as you already have the email one in your form.

Hope that helps,

Darrell Wilson

Thanks for the assist, Darrell.

be-human, does Darrell’s advice help?