Describe the issue or problem
Whenever I try to send a reviewer an email from Submissions → View on a journal → scroll to Reviewers → Press the 3 dots on a reviewer → Email Reviewer. The email wont send. I fill in the subject and the body but whenever I press “send Email” I get a buffer next to the “cancel” button which doesn’t stop buffering. Refreshing the page does nothing and no emails can be found in the reviewers inbox or spam or junk folder.
Steps I took leading up to the issue
Go to ‘Journals’
Click on ‘View’
Scroll down to ‘Reviewers’
Click on ‘…’ next to the viewer
Click on ‘Email Reviewer’
Write an email an click on ‘Send Email’
A buffer appears which buffers non stop.
What application are you using?
OJS 3.5.0-1
Additional information
Couldn’t get logs to work, I tried a few things such as changing smtp_port = 465 to smtp_port = 587
or chaning to smtp_secure = tls. Here is the full censored version of the email section:
[email]
default = smtp
smtp = On
smtp_server = smtp.hostinger.com
smtp_port = 587
smtp_auth = On
smtp_username = info@teebrook.co.uk
smtp_password = Correct Password Input
smtp_secure = tls
allow_envelope_sender = Off
default_envelope_sender = info@teebrook.co.uk
force_default_envelope_sender = On
force_dmarc_compliant_from = On
smtp_debug = On
This typically indicates that you should check your PHP error log for errors found there. Those errors can then provide more clues as to what the specific issue is. If you’re able to locate your PHP error log and share the errors from your log here. If unfamiliar with how to locate your PHP error log, please see this post here: How do I find my PHP error log?
Hello,
I am experiencing two related issues with my hosting account for teebrook.co.uk and my OJS installation located in public_html/maclawreview/.
PHP Execution Problem
• Any manually uploaded .php file (e.g., phpinfo.php, test.php) placed under public_html/ or public_html/maclawreview/ returns a 400 Bad Request error when accessed via browser.
• There is no .htaccess file in these directories that could be blocking PHP execution.
• This prevents me from running diagnostic scripts such as phpinfo() to determine server configuration.
Email Delivery Problem (OJS)
• I have configured SMTP in config.inc.php as follows:
Code:
default = smtp
smtp = On
smtp_server = smtp.hostinger.com
smtp_port = 587
smtp_auth = LOGIN
smtp_username = info@teebrook.co.uk
smtp_password = [REDACTED]
smtp_secure = tls
debug = On
default_envelope_sender = info@teebrook.co.uk
force_default_envelope_sender = On
• I can send and receive emails manually from info@teebrook.co.uk without any issues.
• However, emails sent via OJS are never received by recipients.
• When attempting to send a test email from OJS, I get a generic “An unexpected error has occurred” message.
• Additionally, when sending emails to reviewers from within OJS, the emails are never sent — the loading spinner just keeps running indefinitely.
3. Error Logging
• I have checked public_html/, public_html/maclawreview/, and subdirectories (cache/, plugins/) for an error_log file — none exists.
• In the PHP Configuration panel, I cannot see error_reporting or error_log settings.
• I have displayErrors and logErrors enabled in the panel, but no log file is being generated.
Thank you for your assistance.
This problem is real. 3.5.0-1 does not respect envelope sender so only emails from the system or admin get delivered. All others are rejected. For this reason we have had to roll back to 3.4.0-9 which is the last version where the envelope sender works. It supposed to be fixed for 3.5.0-2 but there is no timeline for this release so the current release is unusable unless you use local sendmail. And then it depends on your server host whether the emails get delivered or not.
We had a similar issue and resolved the envelope issue with a more structural change to how our journals deal with journal manager/editor emails. I’m not sure we ever fully fixed it rather than side step it.
I’ll try to reply again soon with the details of the issue and related bugs I reported during our upgrade process in August. I’m not at my desk right now, but you can check my issues for GitHub @dmcconeghy to see if it is there.
We encountered a DMARC issue when we upgraded that affected the listed contact for our journals. Suddenly after the ugprade non-[our domain] emails were no longer making it through SES. We triaged and changed the contacts temporarily to an internal domain and made other changes to how we handle journal contacts to avoid this in the future. But for now, I believe, we are still unable to send from non-[our domain] emails. We would strongly prefer not to add outside email addresses to our SES rules. I had to set aside work on this issue for other more pressing tasks. This was my initial report: DMARC compliance logic ordering causes SES/SMTP failures · Issue #11766 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub but no follow-ups were made.
I think today I discovered another bug. I’ve reported it here: OJS 3.5.0.1 Review Reminder Date Calculation Bug · Issue #11870 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub It concerns review reminders being sent much earlier than expected with incorrect due dates. We queried our DB to see the length of time between creation/assignment/notification to idenitify there was an issue and track it down.
I would very much like a solution to the DMARC issue, but I hope these other two might solve your issues. I can share some of the queries I used, but Claude did most of the lifting there.