Joomla registration emails and PHP mail() taking hours to deliver

Question

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: Okay so all the emails ended up arriving, but they took anywhere from 30 minutes to 9 hours. Here's the raw message of one maybe osmeone can decipher it for me.

Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of [email protected] designates 27.123.24.218 as permitted sender) client-ip=27.123.24.218;
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="=_e266d617eac1f5608f5278983df8035b"
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2017 01:37:20 +0200
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: This is a test email
Message-ID: 
User-Agent: My Webmail/0.9.5

--=_e266d617eac1f5608f5278983df8035b
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8




--=_e266d617eac1f5608f5278983df8035b
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8



 
 


--=_e266d617eac1f5608f5278983df8035b--

UPDATE UPDATE: So the custom php code way down below that I used to send a test email ALSO successfully delivered - a few hours later.

UPDATE: It seems some emails are actually being sent, but they're taking over 30 minutes to arrive. So account activation emails are taking FOREVER, but all the other emails I previously listed as "working" are sent and received instantly.

Received-SPF: none (domain of webcloud25.au.syrahost.com does not designate permitted sender hosts)
To: [email protected]
Subject: Account Details for Test at Site
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2017 01:22:57 +0000
From: Site Web 
Reply-To: Site Admin 
Message-ID: 
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 446

Hello Test,

Thank you for registering at Site. Your account is created and must be activated before you can use it.
To activate the account select the following link or copy-paste it in your browser:
https://site.com.au/login?task=registration.activate&token=7ae5bfdebc0e204a664175b96c632d0c 

After activation you may login to https://site.com.au/ using the following username and password:

Username: test
Password: 123456## Heading ##

Original

I'm having a problem getting Joomla to send the user registration / activation emails, and getting it to send the Test Email on the Server->Email settings section. I have multiple websites running on the server and they're all having the same issue. Joomla is up to date and PHP Version 7.0.23

I also tried just making a test php file:

    <?php
mail('[email protected]','This is a test message subject','This is a test message body');
echo 'Mail sent.'; 
?>

No errors come up, and the mail() call returns True, but nothing gets sent. The mail.log file shows

[13-Oct-2017 00:56:30 UTC] mail() on [/path/public_html/website.com.au/dev/mailtest.php:2]: To: [email protected] -- Headers:

There aren't any email problems on other parts of the site.

Sending a mass mail works
Chronoforms is correctly sending emails
Creating a user in the backend of the page will send the "You have been added as a user" email
The site sends notifications when a Joomla update is available

I'm using PHP Mail - using SMTP is not really viable.

In the mail.log file I have two types of entries

This is from using Mass Mail, and is an email that was actually sent


    [13-Oct-2017 00:21:32 UTC] mail() on [/path/public_html/site.com.au/libraries/vendor/phpmailer/phpmailer/class.phpmailer.php:700]: To: [email protected] -- Headers: Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2017 00:21:32 +0000 From: Ite Web  Bcc: [email protected] Message-ID:  MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

This is from user registration, and this email was NOT sent


    [13-Oct-2017 01:22:57 UTC] mail() on [/path/public_html/site.com.au/libraries/vendor/phpmailer/phpmailer/class.phpmailer.php:698]: To: [email protected] -- Headers: Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2017 01:22:57 +0000 From: Site Web  Reply-To: Site Admin  Message-ID:  MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

So the one that DOESN'T work goes to line 698 - and the line above that is


if (ini_get('safe_mode') or !$this->UseSendmailOptions or is_null($params)) {

So it appears user activation emails are being sent using SendmailOptions or something ? This shouldn't have any bearing on the custom PHP code not working though.

Have you tried contacting your hosting provider to see if they can shed some light on the matter? — Lodder, Oct 13, 2017 at 8:06
In the middle of that now. I'll post results to help others with the same problem if that's what it is. — Healyhatman, Oct 14, 2017 at 9:32
I did in fact get through to them and they did a bunch of tests and claimed everything was working fine and now, magically and for no reason I can discern, it is working fine. They claim they didn't change anything but who knows. — Healyhatman, Oct 23, 2017 at 5:26
Oh, well that's good news :) Would you mind adding that as a proper anseer below and marking it as accepted when possible? Thanks — Lodder, Oct 23, 2017 at 8:15
Not sure about that sorry. I didn't change anything and they claimed they didn't change anything, the problem that had persisted for weeks simply resolved itself. That doesn't help the next person that has this problem. — Healyhatman, Oct 24, 2017 at 21:09

Michael · Accepted Answer · 2017-12-14 19:27:04Z

As someone who administers mail servers - there are a couple of reasons this can happen.

retry timing mismatch: The recipient server implements greylisting - requiring that the sending server retry the message at a later time, or they're just super busy and reject the message with a temporary error. Legitimate servers will do this, while spammers will just give up. The problem is the lack of standard retry time. My servers are configured to retry after 10 minutes, but I've seen some that don't retry for hours. I saw one configured for a 12 hour retry..... That's insane!
Busy server - message is waiting in queue. If you're on a very busy mail server, your message might be accepted and queued for delivery. Being queued on a very busy server can mean a message waits for hours.

I started running my own mail servers years ago to avoid issues like this.

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