Admin does not receive emails

Hi,
I have spent a lot of time checking my installation and looking throught these forums but cannot seem to find this issue.

All works OK and when a reply to a topic is made emails are sent and received, but...even thought the correct setting is in used $emailadmin=1 these is no email being sent to the admin when a new user signs up or when a new post is made.

Any ideas or assistance appreciated

Thanks

Have you checked this topic:

Why registration or notification email does not work / arrive?

Thanks for the reply however the problem in the other thread is not the problem I am having.

When I sign up as a new member I receive an email confirming password etc, so that works.

I also receive an email when a post receives a reply, so that works OK

So as a user I receive the correct emails, this would indicate that the sendmail is working.

But...I do not receive the emails that should be sent to the Admin ie the email to advise Admin that a new member has signed up and the email to Admin to say a new post has been made to the forum.

So basically the emails to the member work but the emails to the Admin do not.

Many thanks

Hi afescape,
Apart from checking $emailadmin, also check your setting for $emailadmposts.
All the best -
mb

Oh yes... $emailadmposts should be set to 1 as well... is it done so?..

Hi and thanks for the responses. I did check and double check the settings and all were correct.

However I seem to have fixed the problem and will share the fix with you here.

I had set the forum admin email as admin@domain... and as we wanted to use SMTP for security and reliability had added the addition SMTP script to the file. I set the SMTP domain name to admin@domain... ie the same as the admin email. I also added the appropriate username and password. As noted in my previosu postings the emails were being sent fine to users but not to the admin. So after checking all settings I looked at the SMTP side.

I decided to set up the SMTP with details of another email account on the same domain ie forum@domain... but leave the admin email as admin@domain...and this solved the issue and admin now also receives the relevant emails. We are very security concious which is why we use passworded SMTP accounts for sending so people cannot hijack our mail server.

What has been learnt from this...If other people are using properly configured SMTP mail servers they may come across the same issue.

Could I make a suggestion...would it be possible to have an Admin email that is used for admin to receive emails but have a different email address specifically set up for sending out notification emails, this would hopefully help prevent this issue of sending and receiving (at the same time) on one email account.

I hope the above will help anybody with the same issue.

Thanks for a nice product, I look foward to installing it on our site soon

Regards

afescape
You should always warn us if you've made a custom modification.
It's not our free task to investigate custom problems, and it seems now it was completely your mistake of improper configuration.

All I could say admin's email specified in $admin_email of setup_options.php is the common email used as "Reply-To" in all notifications to the users; also as if you set $emailadmin or $emailadmposts, this email will be used also. However, for individual subscribings on forum, admin can specify his own email address and his Profile. In most common cases it is fully enough, however I will put your suggestion into "tasks for thinking" and may be figure it all out for the default version.

By this time, if you look at sendMail() function of bb_functions.php, you will notice it is possible to simply change all return and reply-to addresses to whatever you want.

miniBB provides much more convenient tools as Checker for example, which avoid using of email notifications for admin and keep your resources.

I didn't understand all the hassle around the SMTP security and the things you've done, and how it can be related to miniBB in general (there is a possibility to use PhpMailer as well).

Thanks for the promt response, however you reply does read as if you are a little frusrtared. We did set up the system as recommended in the minibb manual and the phpmailer information so it was a proper configuration. However this did not work on our server so I contacted this message board.

The 'modification' I made was after all other areas of possible incorrect set up had been investigated.

In our experience some mailservers are set up in a very open way, this can lead to improper use of a mailserver. For example we have seen some cases where a mail programme is set up on a specific domain but any domain could use this program to send or relay messages. This is not the case on our set up as only a registered email address can send from a specific email address ie admin@abc...can only send email on the www.abc...domain, admin@xyz...could not send on that domain. It would appear that we have encountered the issue as our mailservers are set up in a very tight way.

Please rest assured that am I not critising your product, it would appear that we missinterprited some of the SMTP set up information and now we have a better understanding of this we seem to be working. The suggestion I provide was just that as it may be of interest to other users who may encounter a similar issue.

Thanks

Thanks for the promt response, however you reply does read as if you are a little frusrtared.

Not frustrated at all :-) I hope you understand I and any other miniBB team should not investigate the problem which doesn't affect our product in general. We don't care about how you set up your own SMTP server.

You should mention every custom change you've made BEFORE posting such kind of problems. Else they will never studied by us. We're doing the support only for the default miniBB version, and basically, it was not clear for me from the very beginning, what kind of bug miniBB has if all emails except for the admin's arrive good, until I read all that.

In your first posts you have not ever mentioned what kind of exact configuration you have, as it is done later when you already solved it yourself. That's not really polite from your side. Have you studied our forum rules?

Even if you mentioned SMTP service, it would be good to know where are you running it. If on Windows, I understand what you are talking about. If on Linux, I can't understand.

ANY SMTP server installed should have an option to accept incoming messages only from a local server. But this all is up to you as always. miniBB doesn't make any risk here.

Anyway thanks for your information... most users don't ever mention what solved their trouble.

Thanks, I think we are both on the same page...I think you have a good product here and will probabily be buying some of the 'add-on's.

Regards

So, thanks again - but finally - where is your SMTP service on? Windows?.. Linux?..

All our systems are running on Windows products. We run a dual pentium processor server for the websites and a separate standalone mail server. We use Mail Enable on the mail server. Thanks.

That's more than clear than :-))

Windows products are always full of security holes. Not a wonder you have troubles like described.

But it would worth to mention this in the first thread still ;-)