Fixing System Mailing Issues On WordPress

🎧Cirphrank👣 — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 21:56:22 +0000

In this post, I'll keep it as layman as possible and as concise as possible, such that even if you are not a developer, you'll find this easy to apply. Without any ado, let's get to it.

Problem: custom mail won't work, the system not sending out mail, e.g. registration confirmation mail.

Solution: USE an SMTP Plugin or Update SPF records.

Using an SMTP.

What a Similar Mail Transfer Protocol does is; evade the use of the PHP mail () function which is the default way your WordPress system uses in executing mail transfer, and proceeds to connect your WordPress system to a 3rd party mailing protocol to send emails instead, most people by default opt for SMTP plugin without even having any issue because most of them come with the option to configure the sender's name for your website whenever a mail is being sent out, something which the mail() function defaults to some wordpress@blablaba kinda name...

But when your WordPress website stops sending out emails for whatever reason (which you may easily find the answer to by chatting up your hosting platform customer care), installing a plugin like WP Mail SMTP and configuring it PROPERLY will fix it. For me, I use: Fluent SMTP, none of these mentioned plugins has any affiliation to me.

Install, activate, goto it's settings.

For the host, on an easy day, it will be your website's URL or smtp.yourwebsitename.tld or simply putting local host might even work.

What certainly works though is: going to your website URL/webmail, then copying the URL that's in the address bar when the page opens, leaving out the column and numbers at the end, you'll have something like: server182.web-hosting.com - that is your host!

For Port: 465

587 or 27 are also indulgeable.

For encryption, use that which your site has, most likely SSL, if you are unsure, use TLS.

For username and password, use the login credentials to the email address you'd like your website to send mail as, as this whole guide is based on the presumption that you are using a mail created from your hosting's CPANEL, something like mailengine@yourwebsite.com (I like to use mailengine for the name of the address of my system's auto emails get sent through😉) if you didn't have one earlier, log into your hosting account CPanel and set one up via the email section.

If you're using any other mail client like Gmail and that's what you want to stick with, you'll have to read up their documentation on how to connect the system to an SMTP plugin. (mostly involves more hassle than CPanel-based webmail will give)

When you've entered those credentials, that's it, click save or connect or whatever the plugin's last button for execution is, and you are good to go, mails should start getting sent now.

But if after doing that, symptoms persist, then you possibly never needed to do that, the only thing that was ever wrong was not a mail() function getting disabled by the hosting company or something, it was a DNS record mishap, and you can quickly realize this from the subject email account being impossible to set up on other system's like your phone's mail client.

SPF Solution

The cause of this is mostly DNS record mismatch or inexistence, which can occur when you newly switched hosting or you switched your secure server layer provider, like from your host to Cloudflare.

If it was a hosting package switch, just chat up customer care, tell them the problem and they'll update your SPF records and things will go back to being just fine. If you have switched to a 3rd party like Cloudflare, you'll need to ask them to kindly give you your domain's SPF records and you'll need to login to Cloudflare and update the records in the DNS section manually, and all will be well.

Footnotes:

Just in case you're curious: SPF is the sender policy framework, the record states all authorized servers that are allowed to send emails from your domain, hence you might want to treat them like a fragile pet.

Don't know how to create custom emails in CPanels? - https://docs.cpanel.net/knowledge-base/email/how-to-create-and-connect-to-an-email-account/

How to create DNS records in Cloudflare: https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/manage-dns-records/how-to/create-dns-records/

TLD means top-level-domain e.g. .com .net .org ...

And that's it, comments or anything can come in in the comment section, Good day.

Image source: Pexels

When Coding Gets Boring

🎧Cirphrank👣 — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 15:04:27 +0000

Over time I've realized coding got boring, for me. Yes, you read that right, the first love of my life became such a bore to me, actually felt seething pains in my heart any time I open VS code and nothing I write nor read just does it for me! And nothing excited me past the first-minute no more, not the new trends like Serverless CMS and all of this fast-rising frontend design utilities.

See, it was quite devastating though I tried to downplay the effect it was having on me, while it was taking its toll, you could find me strolling in the park saying I don't care, after all, most know me as a poet and that's it, but what was bringing pain was not what most know me as, but what I knew myself as and was beginning to see myself less of.

After a couple of months of letting the mental frustration that came with it drive me to weakness even on days I did nothing but game around with my mobile device in a bid to distract myself, I said to myself one day: I can't possibly be the only one experiencing this! and there must have been a couple of folks that have gone through this too.

Upon asking myself that question, I headed on to give our friend a visit and it provided me a couple of answers that led to this link. Over there, is an article from about 9years back! And the dude literally poured my heart out! one of the highlights of his rant for me is:

I feel that all this new stuff is all the same, with simpler (or more) abstractions or automation in it, but it all sounds the same to me. Over and over again. The computable language is all Turing computable, so coding is only a replication of a similar pattern in this subset of a partial function.

Now that part hits differently. Well, I read on and scourged comments and some other pages, and guess what? I dare say coding has become less boring and our relationship is healing. How have I come about that? Keep reading.

The thing is, to have a proper relationship with a buddy like codes, you have to see you both as married and understand that marriage comes with lows as it does highs, so what do you do when the stormy tides come? You baby it out!

Yes, GOD IS DOPE!

Finding that peace you found in coding when you had just started out will not actually come from mastering a new language or a new framework (you won't find happiness in your marriage again by getting another woman, you just gotta see your woman again how you did the first time), it will come from going back to the basics and finding once again the complexities in basics. You gotta HTML and CSS your way out child :) (working for me). And how do you come about implementing that? Don't take up a new job, this is a time to work for yourself.

Give yourself a simple task to build, e.g a URL Shortner web app, for me, I decided to work on www.cirphrank.com - my homepage. To go about it, I downloaded a simple template, a bootstrap, hewn off clever manipulations of CSS and HTML. Just those two and nothing more.

After deploying in my localhost, I toured it, then headed back to VSCode and started reading, yes, reading the codes and that's just it. ( I recalled that's how I started out learning PHP). I didn't care if I knew what I was seeing before, I just read it anyways and sometimes was wowed by how much basic stuff I'd forgotten about their existence. This kept on for a couple of days before I started manipulating as calmly as I could be, I was never in a rush to fix the color scheme of a typo after deployment. I took my time to find all that excited me into starting off this journey in the first place, and it feels good.

And also, I needed to apply what has best been explained in this post too? Dealing with your Inner Critic - a dev's guide.

Recap.

Be a calm baby about it. -Let go of the toxic inner critic.

And that is all I have for you when coding gets boring. I plan to give a walkthrough on how I deployed Cirphrank online in a pseudo-dynamic protocol when next I talk about web development, see you soon. Çiao.

Images: Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash