CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Maybe this can help someone since it took me a long while to get past some of this challenges after much research on this forums:

Had a strange challenge. I used last month DP 6.8 and civimail 2.1 for the monthly newsletter and what a improvement over the previous Outlook method.
Then unknown to me our hosting account was put on another new server with clean standard php and Mysql.
Suddenly my civimail do not send the newsletter and I started to look for errors. Then did some upgading via 2.2 beta etc. etc etc.

Some differences between the clean install and the upgraded version.
(1) Menus differ and looking in the raw table shows the clean install have 219 items versus the upgrade's 185 menu items..
the result of this is that under administer civimail there are three items versus the upgrade's 2 items
The third is the mail accounts option with the following link        /civicrm/admin/mailSettings?reset=1
If yours are also missing please use this and this link are suppose to work with you as well to help with this challenge.

Now to get the clean install going maybe this can be of help to someone since it took me along time to get it going.
2 To get the cron going the old just alphanumeric 2.1 key did not work any more and null did work so I realise there was something wrong. The solution was to generate another key between 16 and 32 characters and it did work from there after the session reset.
My next challenge was to get the normal SMTP to authenticate and this one was so much easier with 2.2 beta 2 and work  with localhost as well as the other mail.mydomain.com. The test email work fine as well as the sent emails to other users even with the tokens in the subject line. What a Beaut!
Then the challenges start to get the massmailer and the queue working to send massmail.
I know the trick is to get chron going and even use the spool reset to send it via the massmailer. The spool reset link of course is /civicrm/mailing/queue?reset=1
I could not get it going even setting up the domain info etc, say it is sending but no mail sent. The cron and queue reset didnt help either on both the internal SMTP accounts (localhost and mail.mydomain.com). My final shot was to use an outside smtp namely gmail with the following settings straight and easy out of the box
SMTP Server      :  smtp.gmail.com
SMTP Port          : 25
Authentication    : Yes
SMTP Username  : username@gmail.com
SMTP Password   : ***
That did the trick and I could send via civicrms massmailer the emials (After setting up a test group of course to whom to sent it.)
So by the way to see if your server is Dom and SOAP enabled I use the the following php code snippet in a file and then point to this file with the browser  the code :
<?php
phpinfo();
?>
( So by the way I could not get sendmail going even if drupal are using it. The path in this phpinfo and the settings is not working in sendmail, so that option was out from the start.)

After I could get the clean install going it was time to see if I can do the same with the upgraded version. Upgrade went smooth as per the normal instructions.
However this was when the menu items became a problem. I solved it with the copy of the clean install menu table into the upgrade DB via phpmyadmin.
The upgrade's v\civimail works fine now with the mail accounts etc. but still only with gmail.
Hope this is of value to someone.
Regards

---

Update: Gmail works for small numbers of emails say below 500 in list . at the moment all emails are bouncing, so this is not the ultimate solution. Also looking for any pointers how to export out of civimail? Update: Gmai allow one to send 500 and then one have to wait 24 h and you can sedn out the next 500 see: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=59797&hl=en&ctx=rosetta
Will keep you posted on more progress....
Progress report:
Could further succeed to get not just normal authentication going with my normal SMTP server but also SSL authentication by using the ssl servername and then the right port as well as putting the ssl://c5.mydomain.com right prefix in there. Still it worked with individual mails but not the massmailer used in the mail account settings of civimail.
After this remark  I  again did some research and then noticed the discussion http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,2382.msg10368.html#msg10368 .
Progress report: After some experimenting I commented line nr 898  civicrm 2.2 stable to     
   //     'Return-Path'      => $verp['bounce'],.
And this hack did the trick to send out the massmailer's mail on my own server with cPanel
WOW

Now t is to see if I can still doing something on the return path or bounced email story
Wil keep you posted!