Email issues on 1 of 2 websites hosted and using zen cart

[Depetris]

Hello,

I am a small web host and allow my customers to use zen cart installed thru fantastico (and of course manually) on their websites if they wish to. Lately i've had a problem where one of my customers websites can not get zen cart to send mail out. My customer has searched thru the faqs and posts on this site (as have I in an attempt to help although honestly this is a bit beyond the scope of the support I normally provide) and can not find a fix or exact problem causing zen cart's mail features to not function properly on his site.

As the host of the web server I know what the settings are that he should use (and that software should use that people install) to access the smtp server properly on the box although using the correct method and settings doesn't seem to make much difference with zen cart oddly. As a test today I installed zen cart thru fantastico on 2 websites and was able to get mail sending out on both of those. I went back and adjusted the settings in the email configuration on the website that is having the problems and get an error telling me that the smtp server could not be accessed. The website having issues does not have any modifications installed on their zen cart installation so I know that it isn't a issue with a 2nd or 3rd party modification. I have checked all the settings on all three installations and I find they all match (outside the fact that obviously 3 websites have 3 different email endings).

As the smtp server is on the same box as the websites the server address setting that works for most software (and for zen cart on 2 out of 3 websites tested on) is "localhost". I've suggested that my client remove and reinstall zen cart although I'm not sure that is going to fix anything honestly and reading threads relating to email problems here on the forums I see this is a seriously common problem for people whose web hosts use a secured method of sending out mail and also disallow the format of "nobody@". Is there something that I can suggest to my client (other then he should use software that I know will work with smtp authentication in a hardened server environment)?

The fantastico installer is installing the latest version of zen cart.
Some websites on the server can send mail using the smtp transport method with the smtp server address set to "localhost" and yet some can not for some reason.
Settings have been matched and verified on all 3 websites.
We have checked posts for 2 days before I decided to make a post about this.
Faqs on your website have been checked and numerous suggestions we've found have been tried although so far none of them consistently help or work.
Other shopping cart software (and php software) that I have installed on the webserver can use smtp without these issues.
Which leads me to believe that it is not a server issue (as suggested in many posts i've read) but a software issue (proved by the fact that not every installation of zen cart reacts or has the same problems).

Are there other areas that may have email settings that conflict with the main "Email Settings" area of the admin section in zen cart that we may or should check?

Thank you for any help in advance.

[DrByte]

All of Zen Cart shares one central email facility, whose settings are controlled in the Admin->Configuration->Email Options area.

In situations where the host/server has disabled "nobody@", I find that using "SMTPAUTH" as the transport method is most successful, because this forces the passing of the username and password to the specified SMTP host+port. Using just "SMTP" method ignores the use of username and password. The appropriate method for your server will have to be determined by you, the host.

The most common cause of an error like (as you said) "SMTP server could not be accessed" would be an invalid mention of the SMTP host server address and/or port number (ie: host is not responding for whatever reason, thus could not be accessed). The next cause is missing or invalid username/password credentials.

When one site experiences problems on the same server as another site which is not experiencing the same problems, you're right that the likely root cause is software. In such cases, doing a file-by-file compare between the 2 sites is usually best, as this can reveal the existence of damaged files or installed addons which might be causing problems. The free and popular WinMerge application makes this task pretty quick and straightforward.

The next possible cause of such differences would be something misconfigured on the server (esp the mailserver in your case) which is denying connections from the particular user/account having the problems.

Related articles:
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7330
http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.p...Email_Problems
http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.p...Obscure_Issues

[Depetris]

Thank you for the quick response. It turns out (after 2 days and quite a few emails with my client) that he didn't use the fantastico installer to install zen cart he installed his version manually (nothing wrong with that as long as you do verify that every file uploaded and has the correct permissions of course). I've suggested to him that he remove his manual installation later on and he use the fantastico installer as I know that will install a complete, current and working version of zen cart. Somehow he must have missed a file or uploaded a corrupt file i guess. My apologies for not getting the full story and also for the long post berating the errors I was seeing.

I will post again if we have any problems (although I think we have it sorted out now as to the cause) and I can't find a fix doing a search of the faqs and posts on your website. Thank you again for your help today.