purchase confirmation emails suddenly stopped arriving

I am using zencart v1.5.0 for my store. Sometime over the past 2 weeks, without me making any changes in admin, I stopped receiving emails confirming when a purchase has been made. The customer also is not receiving a confirmation email.

Under 'configuration' 'email options' I have my email address under 'send copy of order email confirmation to.' And like I said, I haven't made any changes in admin and zencart has been sending order confirmation emails out previously.

I tried just sending an email out from 'tools' 'send email' and that works fine.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

Thanks in advance.

betheone:

I am using zencart v1.5.0 for my store. Sometime over the past 2 weeks, without me making any changes in admin,

If you didn't make changes, then someone else did. You'll need to contact your host and have them review their log files to see what has gone astray.

For us to be of any help we'll be needing a lot more information from you.

Cheers
Rod

What kind of changes should I be looking for?

Are my settings as I've described correct, so confirmation emails should theoretically be sent out?

Thanks again.

betheone:

What kind of changes should I be looking for?

If you didn't make changes, then someone else did. You'll need to contact your host and have them review their log files to see what has gone astray.

betheone:

Are my settings as I've described correct,

I don't think you need to ask this question. You already have the answer....
"Sometime over the past 2 weeks, without me making any changes in admin, I stopped receiving emails"

Common sense/logic suggests that if it was working, and you didn't change anything in this regard, then it was correct for it to work in the first place, and therefore must still be correct. Unless you did change 'something' that you aren't telling us about.

Unless you have more to tell us, my original advice still stands. You'll need to contact your host and have them review their log files to see what has gone astray.

Cheers
Rod

I'm having this problem too, using 1.51 - I've gone into the main server control panel (I rent a VPS) and found in there a report re emails being sent etc which threw up the error message for the order notifications (only, not regular emails) as:
"Please turn on SMTP Authentication in your mail client. (localhost.localdomain) [IP ADDRESS]:42474 is not permitted to relay through this server without authentication."

I'm not sure where that setting is, so I've forwarded the info and asked my webhosts to tell me how to fix it.

Heresy Miniatures:

I'm having this problem too, using 1.51 - I've gone into the main server control panel (I rent a VPS) and found in there a report re emails being sent etc which threw up the error message for the order notifications (only, not regular emails) as:
"Please turn on SMTP Authentication in your mail client. (localhost.localdomain) [IP ADDRESS]:42474 is not permitted to relay through this server without authentication."

I'm not sure where that setting is, so I've forwarded the info and asked my webhosts to tell me how to fix it.

You might also wish to check out
http://www.zen-cart.com/content.php?151-emails-are-not-received-or-sending

Since you are running your own VPS I'd recommend you setup your own SMTP server and utilise that for sending mail. That way you'll not be subjected to any blacklistings that could affect your hosts relay server. It'll also free you of any restrictions on the number or emails being sent by your server, which is always a bit of an issue when using shared or relay servers.

The only downsides are, there won't be any restrictions on the number of emails you can send. This is a hacker/spammers idea of heaven.
If your SMTP servers gets blacklisted in anyway, it is up to you to get it de-listed.

Cheers
Rod.

Here's the whole story. We were hacked at the end of May. We then had a professional clean up our site. It's after this that we no longer received order confirmation emails. Everything else works fine. When I change the order status to 'shipped' we get that email. If I do a credit inside of zencart, we get that email. We just aren't getting the initial order confirmation emails.

Our host does not have logs from before the hacking. That option was not turned on for some reason. It is now. I put an order through and had the host look at their logs. There were no emails showing.

Thanks.

betheone:

Here's the whole story.

:)

betheone:

We were hacked at the end of May. We then had a professional clean up our site. It's after this that we no longer received order confirmation emails.

Did you report this to the professional that did the cleanup? He/She missed something.

betheone:

Everything else works fine. When I change the order status to 'shipped' we get that email. If I do a credit inside of zencart, we get that email. We just aren't getting the initial order confirmation emails..

This pretty much negates any of the server settings as being the cause.

betheone:

Our host does not have logs from before the hacking. That option was not turned on for some reason. It is now. I put an order through and had the host look at their logs. There were no emails showing.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'no emails showing'. The log file should show one of two things, either a successful delivery or a failed delivery. If it is showing 'nothing' then it means that the sending of the emails isn't even being attempted. The question then is why aren't these particular emails not even attempted to being sent. It can't/won't be an addressing issue (that would be logged as an error). This means it is probably an email template file (or similar files, that is only used with the order confirmations). These errors are generally logged in your store's log files (not the server log files that you host would/should have been looking at).

At the end of the day though, your problem is the direct result of hacker activity. It is impossible for us to know what was done to the site, but what we do know for sure is that there is more to do in regards to the cleanup. The current problem could be caused by something as simple as a missing semi-colon at the end of the line in one of the files. IOW, the 'cure' is probably very simple, the hard part is identifying the cause. We are not in any position to help with this. It needs a 'hands on' approach: http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.php/Troubleshoot_-_Diagnosing_Obscure_Issues

Cheers
Rod

Okay, I'm still looking into the issue, and will have the person who 'cleaned up' the site take a look. Hopefully it's a simple fix that will be easily found! Thanks for you help. And I'll let you know how this resolves.

Well I finally solved the no emails issue! Somehow the setting in email options, email configuration had gotten changed. I put it back to PHP as the value and voila the emails now work. Maybe the person who cleaned up our site after the hack inadvertently changed that setting. Anyway that's fixed.

Now the only issue I'm having is when someone buys a download product, and they go to their account information, and view their order there is no link for downloading the product. Any ideas on how to fix that?

Thanks again.

betheone:

Now the only issue I'm having is when someone buys a download product, and they go to their account information, and view their order there is no link for downloading the product. Any ideas on how to fix that?
http://www.zen-cart.com/content.php?82-why-arent-my-downloads-activating-after-checkout

THANK YOU SO MUCH! Can you hear/feel my gratitude?! That did it!

I found another issue since the hack & clean-up, hopefully that has a simple fix:

In Email Options, Set "Contact Us" Email Dropdown List, I made a list in the form suggested:

name 1 email@address1, name 2 email@address1

The email addresses are the same. The first name is our company name, then there's a list of coaches within our company.

Usually we would get an email addressed to the coaches name (if someone had chosen that coach in the dropdown list.

Now the emails are all addressed to our company name.

Any idea how to fix that?