Some types of emails not being delivered in ojs 3.0.2

Dear PKP Team,

For quite some time, we are facing a strange problem. The email system of OJS is not working properly. What I mean to say is, that some of the emails are being delivered to the end users (password reset, new issue published, account creation etc) but some kind of emails (submission acknowledgement, review request etc) are not being delivered. I don’t know how to resolve this issue. I am using SMTP settings (gmail) in config file to send emails.

Please suggest something as I am stuck in nowhere.

Kind Regards,
Farhan Abbas
Software Engineer,
King Edward Medical University.

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Hi @Farhan_Abbas,

If some mail is being delivered, your SMTP configuration (per config.inc.php) is working. However, the messages are likely being spam-filtered. This could be happening either at the service provider level (e.g. gmail STMP server), or in your mail client. However, OJS won’t be aware of whether/why the messages are being rejected, so you’ll need to investigate in either your SMTP service’s email log (you probably can’t get access to this in gmail’s case), or your mail client’s spam filter facility.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Hi @asmecher, Thanks for your prompt reply. I understand what you are trying to suggest here but I am clueless on how to investigate / resolve this issue? It is like I stand nowhere. I will not be able to access gmail logs and there is no one at gmail whom I can talk to. So, what should I do in this regard?

Kind Regards,
Farhan

Hi @Farhan_Abbas,

I would suggest checking if your hosting provider has a different SMTP service you could use and potentially debug with. The gmail SMTP service isn’t ideally suited to using OJS – all emails will appear to have “From:” address according to that gmail account – and as you’ve noted you’ll have a hard time getting access to the mail sending logs when using gmail.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Hi @asmecher,

Thanks for your prompt reply. Actually I am not currently using any external hosting and rather I have hosted ojs and some of our other websites on a server we manage in our university building and I have full control over that server. Logs of ojs does not show any thing useful and as far as gmail is concerned it is already out of reach of common man :). Anyhow, yesterday, I was trying to find out the cause and symptoms of this problem and I noted that gmail websites (google, gmail etc) were not browseable on our live server, so I googled and trying a bunch of tips, I finally disabled and enabled my network adapter and I flushed the dns cache and somehow, I was able to use gmail services and afterwards, mails began to flow smoothly again. I hope it has to do nothing at gmail’s end neither the ojs. But it was a pure headache :).

Really thankful for your time and advice. Keep the good work up.

Kind Regards,
Farhan Abbas,
King Edward Medical University

Hi @Farhan_Abbas,

Glad it’s resolved – thanks for following up!

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

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