No notification subscription confirmation email

[evaarkiv]

Hi,

I've started using OJS, recently upgraded to 2.3.8, for a Swedish open access journal. We want it to be able to use both English and Swedish, but right now Swedish is the default language, and the most complete one. We don't want readers to be able to register as such, but we want unregistered users to be able to subscribe to notifications from us, within the mailing list that OJS provides.

At first, when I was logged out and as a test tried to subscribe different email addresses to the mailing list, I had the problem of blank emails being sent out instead of emails with the link to click to confirm your subscription. But I think I solved this, by (as described here in the support forum) creating the three email templates for notifications that were missing in Swedish. The system then didn't recognize them as such, until I reloaded the Swedish locale, which I also was instructed to do. But I think it was then that no subscription confirmation emails were sent out at all anymore. When I try, it says (but in Swedish...) "An email has been sent to the address you specified. Please click on the confirmation link in the email to add yourself to the mailing list." - but i don't receive an email.

The "notification_settings" in the PHP server shows me the value "mailListUnconfirmed" for "setting_name" and "setting_value" is the address I tried to subscribe. The "user_id" is "0". I've both tried to subscribe these addresses again and deleted them from the "notification_settings" and tried to subscribe them again, with no result. I don't know if I've done any difference, but I've changed the config.inc.php [email] settings to "Maximum number of days before an unvalidated account expires and is deleted
validation_timeout = 2" instead of 14 days just to make it forget faster right now.

It obviously has been working (although blank), and other emailing fron our journal seems to be fine, when I try it. Why doesn't it work now, and how can I fix this frustrating problem?

Regards,

Eva
Arkiv. Tidskrift för samhällsanalys
http://www.tidskriftenarkiv.se

[JasonNugent]

Hi Eva,

In order to diagnose this, can we get a bit more information? You mentioned that you recently upgraded to 2.3.8. Was that when it stopped working? Or did it work after the upgrade, at least for a while?

All servers that send email have processes on them that deliver the email to some other server on the net. There are usually logs for these transactions, often in /var/log/mail or possibly /var/log directly. Can you, or someone with system admin privileges, have a look and see if anything gets logged there when OJS attempts to send out a notification? Can you also look and see if the notification messages are being bounced back and stored some place?

Finally, do any other OJS emails go out correctly? Or have all emails stopped working now?

Regards,
Jason

[evaarkiv]

Hi Jason,

and thank you so much for answering! Somehow, since then, the problem has solved itself. Your question about the mail log made me ask our server provider about it. He said there really was no log to see, more than for 48 hours - but he also asked why we didn't use SMTP. So, I changed the emailing configurations to SMTP, and after some thinking and fixing the config.inc.php, all emailing from OJS seemed to work. Including the notification subscription confirmation.

So, I don't know what fixed the problem, but there seems to be none now (at least regarding this). That's all I wanted to say.

Best regards,

Eva