Scheduled emails failing - HELP

Question

Configuration: MacOS, MAMP, Wordpress, CiviCRM Individual mail works fine. Messages show up in log. Minimal test config with users and groups marked as not-hold and bulk mail. Users in groups are the same as the ones that work for individual mail.

System cron set and working. Mailing job being executed manually (for now).

Debugging and logging are turned on.

I use New Mailing to create a new mailing job. Recipient group shows members (the same one used for individual mail). Sending to single recipient shows completion with no errors and no log messages. Sending to group shows the same. Following through to schedule the message shows success. Manual triggering of job show success. Job log shows:

2020-02-03 11:31:09 Send Scheduled Mailings Entity: job Action: process_mailing Summary Finished execution of Send Scheduled Mailings with result: Success (a:1:{s:9:"processed";i:2;}) Details

Parameters parsed (and passed to API method): a:1:{s:7:"version";i:3;}

Full message: Finished execution of Send Scheduled Mailings with result: Success (a:1:{s:9:"processed";i:2;})

Nothing is in the CiviCRM..log

Any suggestions or help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Lots of digging here: The culprit is Bluehost shared hosting AND VERP (variable envelope return processing), which is an interesting hack and very useful for massive systems. (I am a colleague of Ray Tomlinson and something of a dinosaur when it comes to email protocols ...)

Bluehost is my shared hosting provider (no VERP) and VERP is - well, a hack. VERP SHOULD be handled with extra header settings but is done as a sender NAME which violates all kinds of identity-based authentication protections - but then I'm a security expert and so I do have opinions.

Technical answer: Bluehost (and most others) do not support VERP unless you pay for a VPS or better plan.

CiviCRM - being intended for big players - requires VERP to handle bounces and other issues when dealing with large mailing lists. (Kudos to CiviCRM)

My 501(c)3 is neither a big player (fewer than 20 recipients) nor willing to pay for a VPS (because we're small ...) and not willing to pay for a for-profit CRM (because we're small).

The answer for people in a similar situation to me is to edit out a portion of smtp.php (in the civicrm folder) and comment out:

/*if (!empty($headers['Return-Path'])) {
        $from = $headers['Return-Path'];
    }*/    

smtp.php = (cd civicrm folder; exec find . -name smtp.php -a -print;)

The CiviCRM people (bless them for their efforts !) will rightfully claim that my, and other's, 'solution' is a hack (VERP is a hack too, but useful ...) that should be deprecated with excessive force, but they should also allow the ability for us small folks who have *NO OTHER FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOLUTIONS* an option as part of the configuration.

Love an kisses ...