Problems with Moodle 3.2.4 sending email - only 1 user getting emails

Problems with Moodle 3.2.4 sending email - only 1 user getting emails

by Scott Piland -
Number of replies: 4

Hello,

I'm having trouble sending emails out on the forums. I've isolated what seems to be happening, generally. Here is an example:

I have a course where 15 students are "Students" in the course. If I send out an email the person with the email address that starts with the letter closest to 'a' will get the email, the rest will not. So, for example if I have these users:


User 1: abcd@gmail.com

User 2: bcde@gmail.com

User 3: cdef@gmail.com


If I send an email out with these three users, only User 1 will get the email. If I take User 1 out and resend the email only User 2 will get the email.

All users are confirmed subscribed to the forum.


Any thoughts? We are connected to transactional mail through Mandrill and just upgraded from 2.6 to 3.2.4. Everything was working fine before we upgraded.


Thank you!


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In reply to Scott Piland

Re: Problems with Moodle 3.2.4 sending email - only 1 user getting emails

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

Do you have access to the mail server logs (or know someone who does). The easiest thing is to check what's happening to that mail at the actual server.

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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Problems with Moodle 3.2.4 sending email - only 1 user getting emails

by Scott Piland -

Hi Howard,

I'm trying to get them from Mandrill (owned by Mailchimp) since we run everything through there. I turned Email Debugging on but haven't seen anything out of the ordinary just yet. I'm at a complete loss as to what is going on.

When I login to the Mandrill panel it doesn't even show that the messages went out to the other 14 people; it only shows the email being sent to one. It seems like some kind of setting within Moodle that is restricting the number of emails sent out.

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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Problems with Moodle 3.2.4 sending email - only 1 user getting emails

by Scott Piland -

I should also note that "Student Login: Password reset request" kinds of emails are going out just fine. This seems to just be restricted to Forum (any kind) messages. Here is an example:


picture 1


I have blacked out the emails, but I'll describe what is going on. Aove is the Mandrill Panel. At the very top under July 14, that was an email I just sent out. There are three other people in the course that didn't get it and they are both subscribed. Both Gmail accounts that have received numerous emails in the past.

If you look down the list you'll see under the Subject column a course named ROMEO-SUM17. That course has 16 other students in the class, but only one got the email. Her email starts with the letter "a" and no one else's does. Same thing with the very last one you see there that was sent to users in a course 4FL-TRANSLATION-REVIEW-SUM17. There are 10 other students in the class and her email starts with "c" and every other email address starts with a letter that is after "c" in the alphabet. If you take her out of the course it will send the same email to the next user that has the lowest letter in the alphabet (closest to "a").

It is very strange. Thanks for any help you can offer.

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In reply to Scott Piland

Re: Problems with Moodle 3.2.4 sending email - only 1 user getting emails

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

This is what I would do but I may well have more access to my systems than you do...

1. On the SMTP server, did Moodle even *try* to connect for all the emails? The SMTP logs should give a clue, you should see some information about the message being queued (or not)

2. If the SMTP server does show the connections then it's most likely not Moodle

3. If it does not, we might conclude that the issue is with Moodle cron

4. Disable cron. Post a message with 'send now'. Run cron by hand and watch the output (with Debugging on). Run until you see the emails being sent (it's quite obvious). Do they go. If necessary turn on SMTP debugging but expect lots of output - possibly better to pipe it all to a file. 

My guess is that you have encountered some sort of ant-spam measure on the mail server. It's seeing a burst of the same message and blocking all but the first. This is just a theory but the admins should be able to tell you if they have such mechanisms. Failing that, something is going weirdly wrong in Moodle's cron. 

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