Thursday, February 01, 2007

Solving the comment notification problem

The first time my comment notification wasn’t working was because it was being sent straight into the spam folder of the account that was redirecting to a different account.  In other words, it was a spam folder that I never ever checked because I don’t receive mail there. Legitimate email gets redirected to a different account that I check every day.  So I fixed that one by adding myself into my Gmail contact list (thanks for the tip, Joe!). It was stupid adding the same email address to the same account’s contact list, but it worked. Happy happy.

Then yesterday I started noticing that my comment notification wasn’t working again. This time they weren’t being sent to my spam folder. In fact, they were being bounced back by every Gmail account on the subscription list. There were a bunch of “Mail Delivery Failed” messages that contained the error “unrouteable mail domain gmail.com”.

I researched the problem and, according to this forum thread, many email providers like Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail are making changes to their servers to better fight spam. (Fucking spammers! Always ruining stuff for the rest of us!) Unfortunately this has the side-effect of rejecting some email notifications. Like mine. *grumble*

Luckily there is a solution that seems to work. Most of us have set our blogs to use PHP Mail or Sendmail to send out notifications. By changing the email protocol to SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) the problem will be solved. In most cases, you will need to know the URL of your domain’s SMTP server. In many cases it will likely be smtp.yourdomain.com, or mail.yourdomain.com, or something similar. You will also most likely need a username and password to access it.

Instructions for Expression Engine Users

1. Click the Admin tab
2. Click System Preferences
3. Click Email Configuration
4. Change the Email Protocol drop-down to “SMTP”
5. Below that, enter the SMTP server address, for example, “mail.yourdomain.com” (but without the quotes)
6. Enter the SMTP username and password into the appropriate fields. For cPanel users, this can be the same login you use to access your cPanel.
7. Save this configuration and this should be all you need to do!

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