Contact Us feature no longer works

Hello,

I have a new problem that came up. I'm not exactly sure when this happened, but I don't believe I have modified any related files that would have caused this problem.
What happens is that when you go to our "Contact Us" page and fill in the form & hit "Send," a message says that it was sent successfully. However, nothing comes through to that email address. I know if worked when I initially set the site up. I had tested it a few times before we went "live."

The email address has the same domain as the website. "smtpauth" is set as the method in Admin. "Send emails" is "true." The site is hosted on a Godaddy server, and the path I am using is "smtpout.secureserver.net." The port I have is "80." The password is set correctly.

What I have done to troubleshoot is to try every other method (PHP, sendmail, etc.), resetting the password on Godaddy and in the Zencart admin, tried a different port, tried a different path ( I tried the path & method I saw in an Email troubleshooting article on this site). Even if I purposely put bad password in the Admin area, the tests still say that the contact us form was "sent successfully." In fact, no matter what settings I use it never gives an error on the website.

I also tried a test purchase, and it automatically emailed me like normal, so that works. I also tried using the Contact Us form while logged in as a customer, and it still didn't work.

I called Godaddy and did some troubleshooting with them, and they say there is nothing getting sent to their server while submitting the form, and nothing is going to any "spam" folder. They don't see any errors on their end, so of course they say it's a ZenCart problem. I also tried disabling the Contact Us page and re-enabling it, and still nothing helped.

I would try restoring a file from a backup, if I knew exactly which file to restore. I looked at includes/languages/english/contact_us.php, but didn't see any problems there.

Does anyone have any suggestions, please?

Thank you much,
jp

The files specifically associated with the contact_us page are:

/includes/languages/english/contact_us.php (and the version in /includes/languages/english/YOUR_TEMPLATE, if you've modified the text)
/includes/modules/pages/contact_us/header_php.php
/includes/templates/template_default/templates/tpl_contact_us_default.php (and the version in /includes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/templates, if you've made modifications)

Thanks for responding. I tried restoring all those files from my first backup of the site I did, before I made any changes. It still says the message was sent successfully, but nothing comes through to the Inbox.
Here is what I have set in the Admin configuration (the relevant info):

Title	Value	Action
E-Mail Transport Method	smtpauth
E-Mail Linefeeds	LF
Use MIME HTML When Sending Emails	false
Send E-Mails	true
Email Archiving Active?	false
E-Mail Friendly-Errors	true
Email Address (Displayed to Contact you)	[email protected]
Email Address (sent FROM)	[email protected]
Emails must send from known domain?	Yes
Email Admin Format?	TEXT

Thanks,
jp

Probably incorrect. SMTP is generally on port 25 (or 587).

You'll need to confirm this with your host though. Either way, port 80 almost certainly won't work on any system, as this is reserved for HTTP not SMTP.

Cheers
Rod

Shoot. I just realised you are with GoDaddy... All bets are off.

Can't say your hosting will be the same, but about a year ago, I had a client using GoDaddy and ran into a number of caveats with email. The client was NOT using Zen Cart - just straight PHP.

1. Using a GoDaddy email address, we were unable to use SMTP. The solution for my client was to use sendmail (with from known domain) and making sure the from header was set to the correct email address (alternatively we were able to use SMTPAUTH via their "relay" server through gmail).
2. On GoDaddy hosts, typically you are rate limited for email sending from PHP. If you exceed the number allowed they may drop messages (rare unless your account is hijacked or VERY active).
3. They also tend to "hold" your mail for 15-30 minutes and send out your email in "batches". So they will report "success" but the email may not have been sent from their servers, just received and placed into the "queue".
4. I can tell you some of the emails sent by my client's forms took 4-8 hours to be received by hotmail and gmail accounts (only a handful). So... if you have not already, you may want to check and see if those emails just arrived late.

http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.php/Troubleshoot_-_Email_Problems - especially note the GoDaddy settings, since that's your current host
http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.php/Troubleshoot_-_Understanding_Causes_Of_Lost_Emails

Thanks all, for the replies! :-)

Here's the update:
I tried Port 25 (along with every Transport Option), no luck.
I checked the max number of transmissions per day, and it was set at 250.
Waited several hours, nothing comes through.
I called GoDaddy, and they again say there is nothing in the queue, and nothing is "bouncing off" their servers.
I'll try the "Email Archive Manager" tool tomorrow.

Sales email confirmations are still getting sent to users.
Auto-emails are also getting sent to the email address above, whenever I make any changes to the Admin/configuration settings.

OK, I installed the Email Archive manager (in Dr Byte's first link), and enabled it. Nothing shows up in there after sending test messages in the Contact Us form.

A link to your site might help us help you ...

Have you tried using a different setting for Set "Contact Us" Email Dropdown List? For example just blanking out this setting in the admin? (probably not related, but you really do not need to set this if it is the same as the store email).

It's memorableilluminations.com

We took the form off the Contact Us page so customers wouldn't send something through it and expect a response, then get frustrated with us...
It'll be on there as I test it, but that's about it.

lhungil:

Have you tried using a different setting for Set "Contact Us" Email Dropdown List? For example just blanking out this setting in the admin? (probably not related, but you really do not need to set this if it is the same as the store email).

lhungil is a genius! :-)
I'm not sure what the problem was in that part (extra space, no space where it was needed?) but I took the address out entirely and now the form works!

Thanks everyone, I appreciate all the help! :D

--edit: I think I see the problem now. I didn't have name, then the email address inside the brackets. Like this: **Name <AddressItself>
**I just had the email address in there by itself.

jp

Thanks for confirming that entering a valid email address according to the pattern shown in the help text next to the setting's input field solved the problem you were experiencing.

No problem. I tested it again as shown in the post above & did verify that it worked that way as well (forgot to put that tidbit in there). So no email address in there at all or the email address correctly listed both work. I must have added it there after I had originally tested it. :-/

Thanks again, everyone. You are much appreciated!

Just wanting to bump this old post, because Dr. Bytes solution on the first link (relative to Godaddy) fixed my problems. For no apparent reason, the email feature stopped working, and godaddy support was no help. They tried to sell me some partner scanning program to "fix some hack they could see". But I followed Dr. Byte's steps, and everything works now. Thanks you sir!