No email from forum - Could not authenticate

No email from forum - Could not authenticate

by Flosi Kristjánsson -
Number of replies: 3

While trying to fix a failure in emails from forums, I got the following log sent to me from our Moodle server. So, apparently the capability to send emails is not totally lost!

How can one tell if the SMTP server needs authentication? Which user name needs to be entered in order for the authentication to work, if it is mandatory?

 

Insert into log table failed at Thursday 11th of August 2011 02:10:40 PM.
It is possible that your disk is full.

The failed query parameters are:

array (
'time' => 1313071840,
'userid' => '744',
'course' => '1',
'ip' => '82.112.70.90',
'module' => 'library',
'cmid' => 0,
'action' => 'mailer',
'url' => NULL,
'info' => 'ERROR: SMTP Error: Could not authenticate.',
)

 

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In reply to Flosi Kristjánsson

Svar: No email from forum - Could not authenticate

by Flosi Kristjánsson -

It's obvious to me that the mail server is not cutting off traffic, because a new user creating an account in our Moodle site, netnam.reykjavik.is, gets an answer from the system.

However, the forum module is, and has for the past four years, been causing trouble. There is something which makes it next to impossible to have mail sent from forums (fora?), such as this one.

I know for a fact that a copy of this email will be in my in-box seconds after I hit the Submit button. Why can't I set my Moodle site to send emails whenever somebody adds a comment to a forum? Moodle.org is working perfectly in this respect.

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In reply to Flosi Kristjánsson

Svar: No email from forum - Could not authenticate

by Flosi Kristjánsson -

Apparently the root of my problem was that the script cron.php which was ready and waiting to do its job, but did not know when!

When I ran it manually, the forum mails were sent, with the exception of student mails which had not waited for the mandatory 30 minutes.  The cron script has  to be set to run every hour or every 30 minutes if the forums are being used.

Today we have successfully set up a forum for a group of teachers and all mail has been sent, both contributions from the teacher of the course and the students.

I chose Auto subscription, and Read tracking On for this forum and things have been going smoothly! (cross fingers!)

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In reply to Flosi Kristjánsson

Re: Svar: No email from forum - Could not authenticate

by Vincent Mabillot -

Hi,

I have a similar problem, my forums messages and other cron action don't worked. I suspect the cronjob too.

I solved the problem using an alternative command in crontab (wget doesn't allow everywhere).  I use the lynx command : lynx -dump http://example.com/moodle/admin/cron.php > /dev/null

It works like a charm every 15 minutes.

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