Contact Form Not Sending Email

[michaelboatright]

Contact Form has stopped working. Good news, not getting any spam emails. Bad news, not getting any spam emails. I’ve had it working for quite some time (all the way back to BL3), with the occasional glitch here and there. Sometime within the past few months (really can’t remember when, been in the midst of a never ending studio move for about 4 months now), my spam emails dribbled off and I just discovered all my contact emails have dribbled off. Contact page itself works. Enter the info, play the train-the-google-ai aka recaptcha game, hit send, wait about 20 seconds the the contact page/?success page comes up indicating it was sent. Only no email gets sent.

Email settings are per best practices page:

Contact Forms and Recaptcha same as for initial setup under BL5 and seem themselves to be working:

Until today, I didn’t know about the admin contacts page…but all the test emails (and spam…seem’s I’ve missed some really great “offers”) I’ve been sending have been getting written there:

Under Special Links page, I do a send test mail with debugging on and get the following (I think this is expected):

Also from Special links, the installed PHP modules are listed below. When I do View PHP Info, I get a blank page, but from site cPanel, I see it is on PHP 8.1, however, I did regress site to PHP 7.4 and got the same problem, so restored it to 8.1.

So I assuming that the contact form itself is working, just the email component isn’t sending.

noDaddy did, apparently move me to a different server a couple of months ago, so there’s possibly that, but too late now, I think to try to figure out if they changed any configuration.

I THINK I understood some info on from a google search that says that use of smtp.gmail.com now requires authentication with a gmail account, and this could well be my problem. But we’ll all be on Backlight Version 65536.9.9 before I sign up for a gmail account (and then, over my dead body).

So maybe the answer is change the best practices, and try to find another smtp server to work with. I *** COULD *** try setting up with my micro$oft365 account, if it weren’t for the fact that every time I try to do something with active directory I seem to create bigger problems than I solve.

Web host is noDaddy, who only seem interested in selling me their version of micro$oft365 and charging me way too much for my domains and hosting.

Is there any solution, or any better solution besides RSS (not particularly keen on) or logging on to Backlight admin everyday?

Installed PHP Modules:
Core
date
libxml
openssl
pcre
sqlite3
zlib
bz2
calendar
ctype
curl
hash
filter
ftp
gettext
json
iconv
SPL
pcntl
readline
Reflection
session
standard
mbstring
shmop
SimpleXML
tokenizer
xml
litespeed
i360
bcmath
dom
fileinfo
gd
imagick
imap
inotify
intl
exif
mcrypt
mysqli
mysqlnd
PDO
pdo_mysql
pdo_sqlite
Phar
posix
soap
xmlreader
xmlwriter
zip
Zend OPcache

[michaelboatright]

For what it’s worth, I have always used email as the lowest common denominator. But I’m not opposed to a different notification method if I can make it work with out too much effort (RSS/Zapier/IFTTT?) or build my own php contact form. Or some kind of integration that sends me a message in FB or IG?

[michaelboatright]

Has ANYONE successfully connected Backlight to an Office365/Outlook account? I’ve tried all three ways of connecting and cannot find a config that will mail with SMTP AUTH, Direct or OAUTH methods.

[Ben]

Hi @michaelboatright, we have a wiki page with some advice for Bluehost users. Some of this may apply to your hosting as well, in particular setting up an email address in GoDaddy that matches what you’re trying to use as the sender address in Backlight. Hopefully something here helps:

Bluehost Issues | Backlight

[michaelboatright]

@Ben I have spent the past several days running around in circles between Godaddy and Microsoft. Turns out, the actual problem was Microsoft quarantining all the emails that were being relayed using the gmail.com server. Essentially, it could not authenticate the sender address (my address, f64@michaelboatright.com) using SPF and DKIM. Although I do have keys from my site, they were useless coming from the relay site. So I entered the maze of twisty little passages…

Sendmail on my GoDaddy shared hosting server requires authentication using an email address configured on that server. Only michaelboatright.com is configured on Microsoft Office365, not the godaddy server. But it turned out that I still had my <> old mikeboatright.com domain in Godaddy DNS. So Godaddy configure/kludged an email address “sendmail@mikeboatright.com” for authentication for sendmail. This lead to ALL kinds of problems on the microsoft end and DID NOT solve the quarantining problem. I can go into more details about this later, however, the Microsoft tech I spent close to 3 hours with today suggested I try using Microsoft Office’s SMTP relay.

The MSFT support tech had me configure Backlight per the same process as the google hit from IBM:

To send emails via Office 365 SMTP, enter the following settings into your app or email client:

SMTP server name: smtp.office365.com.
SMTP port: Port 587 (recommended) or port 25.
TLS/StartTLS: Enabled.
Username/email address: john.doe@yourcompanyname.com.
Password: Your Office 365 password.

Apr 11, 2024

So I configured Backlight as follows:

Then went into Special Links and brought up the Send Test Message:

This fails with the following debug messages:

If I change the Security Protocol to TLS per google/IBM an MSFT tech:

and resend the test message, it fails with the following debug messages:

NOTE that the same failures occur if I use Port 25 instead of Port 587.

The MSFT tech had me use the dnscheck.com smtp test tool with this same configuration:

and it passed:

``

Note that the tool failed to send to Port 587 with SSL and failed to respond with either TLS or SSL protocol on Port 25.

If I go back to the Godaddy server, I get all kinds of quarantine issues because O365 thinks that since it can’t find SPF1/DKIM records tying that server and my michaelboatright.com domain. It should be noted, however, that I do seem to get it to MSFT Office 365, albeit in quarantine, if I configure it with

and

with the correct password, of course.

However, it does seem, all though I’ve been in so many twisty passages, I’m not sure, that while sending the test message works, sending from the contact page does not.

So to summarize, it should also be noted that one should never attempt any IT work, much less network protocol configurations, on Friday the 13th. I will be headed out shortly looking for a guy with a chainsaw named Freddy.

Cheers

[michaelboatright]

One last thing. In my MSFT Outlook inbox, I received the following (as a result of using the dnschecker.org SMTP test tool).

[michaelboatright]

Update: I made a quick stream_get_transports() PHP checker on my Godaddy server:

portlist.php >

<?php $xportlist = stream_get_transports(); print_r($xportlist); ?>

https://www.michaelboatright.com/php/portlist.php
Array ( [0] => tcp [1] => udp [2] => unix [3] => udg [4] => ssl [5] => sslv3 [6] => tls [7] => tlsv1.0 [8] => tlsv1.1 [9] => tlsv1.2 [10] => tlsv1.3 )

[Ben]

Hi @michaelboatright, I think you’d have a better time with Freddy than getting your email working.

In my experience it seems quite typical that web hosts don’t allow connection to external SMTP servers. Using ‘mail’ instead of smtp is usually the only way of getting emails out (which as you’ve found still isn’t necessarily without problems).

[michaelboatright]

Hmmm. That’s disheartening.

What does “mail” do versus “smtp?” I understand SMTP pretty well, but not exactly sure what setting the Mail Send Type to “mail” actual does. Perhaps this is documented somewhere, but I haven’t seen or groked it…

Check that. I see that when I hover over the “i” button on the system settings page, it says mail is "The vanilla PHP email. Is that the page that comes up when you select “Contacts” on the Admin tab, i.e., messages stored in the TTG data base?

Thanks