CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Note: I spent 30 minutes trying to make a post here without seeing an error about "external links" before I finally gave up. Look at the attached text file for a much better description.

I realize that "it won't send" is probably a fairly common complaint here, but this issue popped all of a sudden and I'm nearly out of ideas. Up until now, we had no problem sending messages using PHP mail(). A few days ago I noticed that one of our daily reports wasn't being sent. Cron has been acting quite shady as of late so I thought it was simply a cron problem. After a lot of tinkering, it's obvious that the jobs are running because it's recorded in the logs; the messages just don't show up. This problem is confined to CiviCRM; Drupal can still send messages fine, and I can do it from the command line e.g. php -r "mail('foo[at]bar.com', 'test', 'test');" without complications.

The PHP mail() log, however, has no record of CiviCRM's attempts. I'm totally flummoxed. I haven't changed any mail settings and the only thing I've done lately even remotely related to this was editing the report to rearrange fields. It's not just the reports though; any mail that CiviCRM tries to send vanishes into the abyss, whether a receipt, as an activity, test mailing, etc. The only lead I have is that the PHP mail() log isn't recording CiviCRM's attempts to send messages, so it must be failing before that point. If I send a message through the command line, it comes up in the log as expected.

If anyone has suggestions/advice, I'm all ears.

I figured it out and I hesitate to describe the solution because now I feel silly.

I mentioned that cron jobs were not executing reliably, and while I was troubleshooting that issue apparently I defined CIVICRM_MAIL_LOG and forgot what its side effects are; hence, no mail sent.

Thanks for the tip lobo, starting from there and eventually working my way back to the Mail_mail class helped me fix this.