Could Not Start Mail Function

[crawforw]

Greetings,

After a while away, back with a fresh install of the 2/15/18 release on 3.5.8 and cannot get a form to email:

Upon submission, get "Could Not Start Mail Function, Could Not Email {address identified}.." It was supposed to send to both a) the submitter based on a field entry and b) a specific email address that all registrations are going to. The plugin is set up to use an article template, in this case an Invoice.

Further, in the backend, cannot export the submitted data to the form to a CSV - the popup displays "Loading 0/records" and never does anything more. There are only 8 records in the table currently.

Any guidance is appreciated. Could not find any threads for the email issue. Is there a setting in Joomla somewhere? Missing something in Fabrik?

Thanks
Wes

 

[cheesegrits]

Are you sure it says "Could not start mail function", not "Could not instantiate mail function"?

What method do you have J! configured to use for email? I'm guessing "PHP Mail"? If so ... don't use that. Use "SMTP", either configured to send through your host's outbound service (they can tell you what hostname and port to use) ... or configured to use a third party mail relay service like Send Grid or Mailgun.

I *strongly* recommend using Mailgun. They have a free tier, good for (I think) up to 10,000 outbound emails a month. The advantages of using a service like Mailgun are numerous. Most importantly, they go to great lengths to protect the "reputation" of their servers, so you are much less likely to wind up being flagged as spam (unlike sending through your host's servers, where if one of their other customers using that service is spamming, you'll get tarnished by that reputation scoring). And you have a dashboard where you can see exactly which mails have been delivered, which ones have been opened, which ones are bouncing, etc. If you use any of the built in J! methods like PHP Mail, or SMTP through your server host, you basically have no way of ever knowing if they got successfully delivered.

Even if that's not the problem causing the "could not instantiate", it's still worth getting a Mailgun account, and delievering all your outbound mail through them.

-- hugh

 

[crawforw]

Thanks very much Hugh. It was indeed the "Could not start mail function", not the 'instantiate'. It then lists the two emails it was supposed to send to with "Could not sent to...".

It was also set to POP3. I am essentially rebuilding a registration form that I've used for 8 years, last on a J!2.5 site that I finally imploded and have rebuilt fresh. Imported nothing over, just a clean build. The email has been working faithfully on the old site but on this new build I cannot get it to work.

I will review switching to SMTP with siteground and see if that solves it. Thanks for the help!

 

[cheesegrits]

Yup, SMTP through Site Ground is usually pretty reliable.

I'd still consider a Mailgun account though. Being able to track deliveries and bounces is very useful. Going through Site ground (or any other provider) SMTP, there's no way to ever know if an address is bouncing.

-- hugh

 

[crawforw]

We are up and running. Thanks for the quick help! Email function restored.