E-mail not sent, test e-mail returns an error
 

Hello,

I'm facing a annoying problem with vB4.2.2 PL6: I cannot send e-mail anymore from vBulletin.

There is no e-mail for notification, no e-mail sent from the contact form, no e-mail sent to users... well, no e-mail :D

I ran the e-mail diagnostic utility and this is its reply:

The fact is that I can send and receive e-mails from my server. The contact e-mail address works fine when I use it with SquirrelMail, BUT it doesn't receive contact e-mails sent from the forum form.

Would you have any idea?

Thank you in advance!

Verify that smtp email processing is disabled.

If smtp is what you want to use, verify the login & server credentials are correct.

If you have log access on server level, send a test email while using for example tail while in a shell: tail -f mailllog | grep "email@yousentto.com"

If not download the log, like thru ftp if it isnt a dedicated server with shell access & search for the email you sent to, im going to guess you should see a lot of errors if the site sends out daily notifications.

Hi Snakes1100 and thank you for your answer :)

The SMTP protocol is disabled in vBulletin options.

We have a dedicated server.

tail found nothing. We use exim4 and its log looks like this :

I skipped many lines that look like those ones.

I have no mail in queue as shown in main admin screen on vBulletin.

So I do not know where the problem lies... :confused:

Thank you for your help!

tail -f /var/log/exim_mainlog | grep "email@yousenttointest.com"

If you say no outbound email works, then exim's mainlog should be full of clues as to why.

So to be sure I'm doing things right, I log on my server and run

tail -f /var/log/exim/mainlog | grep "myemail@blabla.com"

The i open the admin panel in vB and ask him to send a test e-mail via the diagnostic tools.

But nothing shows on the terminal of the server. The tail process is pending without any output.

I wonder where the chain is broken...

Thank you for your help, Snakes1100 ! :)

tail -f /var/log/exim_mainlog | grep "email@yousenttointest.com"

Not exim/mainlog

Run that in a shell & then send a email.

Sorry for my silliness but the file doesn't exist:

It's in French but I guess you can understand :)

What goes wrong with these mails?

Thanks for your help!


edit: same error with tail -f /var/log/exim_mainlog | grep "me@blabla"

exim by default stores all its logs in /var/log.

not sure what your setup is or who may have did anything custom on it, but you'll need to find the exim logs & see why its failing to send out emails.

I'm surprised as I just checked on my computer by installing exim4 and the mainlog is in /var/log/exim4 as well.

I'm using Ubuntu 18.04 and our server runs on Debian 10. Maybe this point was different before, I don't know.

Do a search for the exim logs then.

find / -name exim_* -print

Here you are:

So I made the same for exim4 :

It appears they renamed & moved quite a bit in that OS version.

Youre gonna have to edit the config & find out where & what its naming the log files.

Once you find the correct log, then you can tail the log as you test & send out an email.

So... as far as I can understand, there is a big mess on our server. We actually have two different versions of PHP : 5.3 and 7. And vBulletin is using 5.3 which is not supported any longer. As our server uses PHP 7 for e-mails, it doesn't do the link between vB and the mail server...

I now have to plan cascading updates for vBulletin and PHP to make things right and only then make further mail tests.

I hope this will be sufficient.

Sorry for the disturbance and thank you again Snakes1100 for your help! I'll post news when I get some.

1st, you actually need to test - 5.3 may or may not be the issue, you simply need to verify that by checking the log php is using as explained in response to the PM.

Just because someone told you 5.3 is the issue, doesnt mean its so.

I didn't find in php.ini where errors are loggued...

Path is not specified so I guess it would be in syslog BUT when I try a diagnostic mail... nothing more shows in syslog.

Where could it be, by default ?

You need to find the php.ini file that your site uses, as you stated it runs 2 versions of php.

Check your phpinfo in the admincp.

Yes, we use PHP 5.3.29 as shown in admincp and so I checked that file:

/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

I also checked those two files:

/usr/php53/lib/php.ini
/usr/php56/lib/php.ini

just to be sure but I found no path for an error log.

Confusing...

Thank you for your help!


edit: here is what I find on the server:

Maybe the path is defined in one of these files?

You can set a log in the ini that the site is using to log errors, so just make a listing in:

/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

Restart apache/php if it doesnt start logging after adding it.

Well that doesn't work as the file is not created, even after restarting apache2.

I put this in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini:


but the file /var/log/phptesterror.log doesn't exist, even after trying the diagnostic mail.

create it yourself

I created it with nano, but it stays empty even after restarting apache2 and trying to send diagnostic mail.

Still confusing for me :/

Here is the result of phpinfo() :

So I make changes in /usr/php53/lib/php.ini to add error_log = /var/log/phptesterror.log under log_errors = On

I restarted apache2 and here is what I have with phpinfo() :

So I checked rights on file /var/log/phptesterror.log :

As far as I understand, the file is writable by root, as well as other log files in this directory. So that SHOULD work, but when I run a diagnostic email with vBulletin, nothing writes down in that /var/log/phptesterror.log

I don't know what to do :(

-rw-r----- 1 root adm 125 déc. 6 06:25 mail.err
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 1,5K déc. 5 06:25 mail.err.1
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 156 nov. 28 06:25 mail.err.2.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 157 nov. 21 06:25 mail.err.3.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 357 nov. 14 20:05 mail.err.4.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 4,5K déc. 6 12:35 mail.info
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 47K déc. 5 21:54 mail.info.1
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 6,9K nov. 28 23:29 mail.info.2.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 5,2K nov. 21 14:30 mail.info.3.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 4,7K nov. 14 23:26 mail.info.4.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 4,5K déc. 6 12:35 mail.log
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 47K déc. 5 21:54 mail.log.1
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 6,9K nov. 28 23:29 mail.log.2.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 5,2K nov. 21 14:30 mail.log.3.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 4,7K nov. 14 23:26 mail.log.4.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 125 déc. 6 06:25 mail.warn
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 1,5K déc. 5 06:25 mail.warn.1
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 156 nov. 28 06:25 mail.warn.2.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 237 nov. 21 13:13 mail.warn.3.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 357 nov. 14 20:05 mail.warn.4.gz

Those are your mail logs there

cd /var/log
tail -f mail.err
send an email

tail -f mail.log
send an email

OK so:

Nothing more after sending e-mail. I checked /var/log/exim4/paniclog a lot of times, nothing new there but to be sure, here's the content:

I trimmed the log as it is too long for the post. As the problem is recent (about two months or so), I suppose this has nothing to do with it.

Nothing more either.

Thank you for your help!

chk the other exim logs for the out bound emails.

/var/log/exim4/mainlog:

Nothing about that test mail... I send it at 8:43.

/var/log/exim4/rejectlog is empty.


Here could the hell be the error vBulletin tells me about writen down? :confused:

Thank you for your help, Snakes1100!

OK so the problem has been solved since we managed to upgrade PHP to 5.4. We'll have further updates until vB 4.2.5 and PHP 7.1 to avoid security problems. And hopefully, compatibility problems too...

Thank you Snakes1100 for your patience and help!