Invitation email not being sent

[pgrafix]

We are trying to integrate IA into our BP setup. In testing, we have found that although a success message is displayed after sending an email invite that the email itself is not being sent. We are using the WP SMTP plugin to send transactional emails via Mailgun. I can confirm that:

1. The email never gets logged on the Mailgun side. Thus, it never left WP.
2. There are no errors pertaining to a failure in the serve logs.

We have run the fix for missing IA templates from https://gist.github.com/boonebgorges/03945bad2fd6870f608eb5affd853f83 as stated by you in https://wordpress.org/support/topic/invitation-emails-not-sent/. While the missing email templates were created, it did not restore the sending of the invitation.

As also outlined in https://wordpress.org/support/topic/invitation-emails-not-sent/, If line 1358 of the by-email.php is commented out then the emails finally get sent. However, this is just a band aid since the change would be overwritten on every IA update.

Please advise.

And thank you for your work!

[boonebgorges]

Hello and thanks for the ticket.

Can you confirm that this is the plugin that you use for email sending? https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smtp/

Perhaps the best recommendation I can make for further debugging is to collect the return value of bp_send_email() on this line https://github.com/boonebgorges/invite-anyone/blob/1.4.x/by-email/by-email.php#L1378 and log it somehow. For example:

$email_results = bp_send_email( 'invite-anyone-invitation', $to, $bp_email_args );
error_log( print_r( $email_results, true ) );

Instead of error_log() you can use whatever other logging tools you have at your disposal.

[pgrafix]

Thank you for the response.

Yes, that is indeed the plugin.

I instituted your logging code beginning on line 1379 but nothing is getting logged. I attempted to run the second line as error_log( $email_results, 0 ); as well, but still nothing gets logged. According to Cloudways documentation, error_log is being implemented as they instruct to, so not sure where the logging process is breaking. I even went as far as to using json_encode to echo the value of $email_results to the console but it is returning nothing as well.

[boonebgorges]

I can't give in-depth advice on how best to run error reporting across platforms and configurations. For instance, it could be that logging is being blocked at the WP level (WP_DEBUG is false) or at the PHP level (error_reporting(0) or the like).

The following should be config-independent:

$file = 'some/writeable/log/path/on/your/server.log';
$log_entry = print_r( $email_results, true ); // You must do this in order to create a string out of the WP_Error object
error_log( date( '[Y-m-d H:i:s]' ) . ' ' . $content . "\n", 3, $file );

Hopefully that helps, or perhaps you can rig up some other way of logging (even a var_dump() or something).

[pgrafix]

I have the logging code using this:

$email_results = bp_send_email( 'invite-anyone-invitation', $to, $bp_email_args );
$file = (WP_CONTENT_DIR . "/" . 'invite_anyone.log');
$log_entry = print_r( $email_results, true ); // You must do this in order to create a string out of the WP_Error object
error_log( date( '[Y-m-d H:i:s]' ) . ' ' . $log_entry . "\n", 3, $file );

If I use $content as indicated in your code the log is blank. Using $log_entry seems to return as simple binary of 1. Here are the logs:

[2022-11-17 17:52:01]
[2022-11-17 17:53:01] 1

Line 1 is using $content. Line 2 is using $log_entry

[boonebgorges]

Sorry, yes, $content was obviously an error. $log_entry is the proper variable.

The fact that you're getting a 1 means that bp_send_email() is returning true. This is unexpected, and I'm not sure how to interpret it.

You say that Mailgun is not showing anything; do the wp-smtp logs show any outgoing mail?

I guess you could try digging deeper into the BP_PHPMailer class and then into WP's PHPMailer to see if you can identify where the process is getting hung up.