Lost Formatting Problems of Digest emails

megabase
(@megabase)

5 months, 3 weeks ago

Hello,

We were thrilled to discover this plugin as our buddypress forum members have frequently requested daily and weekly digest options.

We are experiencing a problem however where the digest emails often appear as one giant paragraph instead of the expected layout.

How it looks:
https://stellarwebstudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Digest-formatting.png
How it should look (and sometimes does)
https://stellarwebstudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Screenshot_4.png

Post SMTP is activated to use MS365 servers, which I know affects how BuddyPress sends emails. We would be happy to pay for pro support to work through this issue – is that a possibility?

Please let us know if there is a way to bring you on board to work through the problem.

This is for a fairly large organization and there has been pressure to resolve this for a few weeks now, but our efforts have not prevailed so far.

Thank you!

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 21 total)

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Plugin Author r-a-y
(@r-a-y)

5 months, 3 weeks ago

Follow the advice here:
https://github.com/boonebgorges/buddypress-group-email-subscription/wiki#3-i-upgraded-to-v370-and-foreign-characters-look-incorrect-in-my-email-why

And see if that works or not.

Strothi
(@strothi)

5 months, 3 weeks ago

Dear @r-a-y,

I’m having the same issue as described by @megabase which I also mentioned to @boonebgorges in this threat: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/get-blog-posts-into-digest/

I now tested with your suggestion above and unfortunately it didn’t change a thing. As described to Boone, I used this solution to make Buddypress send HTML emails with proper formatting which worked great for all mails except for the ones that BP GES sends: https://ast.io/html-emails-buddypress-bbpress/

I’d also be happy to donate to you guys as you’ve been really enabled our small non-profit to communicate better with our community over the past years! 🙂

Any help would be appreciated, as sending our emails without formatting is rather problematic.

Kind regards, Philip

Plugin Author Boone Gorges
(@boonebgorges)

5 months, 3 weeks ago

The screenshot from @megabase suggests that there are two issues:

1. The SMTP plugin is using the “plaintext” version of the BPGES email. You can tell by the [bracket] format for links; in the HTML version of the email, these are proper <a href=...> elements.

2. Something in your system is causing linebreaks to be stripped from the plaintext email content.

I think that the original question from @megabase is about the second issue, but solving the first would probably be the better overall fix.

The technical details here might depend on whether the plaintext-version emails are coming only in the case of digests, as opposed to BPGES “immediate” emails. But here are some places to look:

– Is the bp_email_use_wp_mail flag set to true or false? It should be false, but it’s possible that your email plugin is causing it to be flipped to true.
– Does the digest email template exist in Dashboard > Email? Situation should start with “An email digest is sent to a member….”
– Is something forcing your email system to use the ‘text/plain’ Content-Type header? See https://github.com/buddypress/BuddyPress/blob/a78f37c70bcbf85f04dd3866ad1739acad730920/src/bp-core/bp-core-functions.php#L3401

Strothi
(@strothi)

5 months, 3 weeks ago

Dear @boonebgorges,

thanks for looking into this, much appreciated. So, to answer your question on Digest vs other mails, in my case it’s not just the digests, it’s all emails which are sent. As you can see here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/o2s2og1juq3ai7m/BPGES_Email.jpg?dl=0

Kind regards, Philip

Strothi
(@strothi)

5 months, 3 weeks ago

Dear @boonebgorges, @r-a-y,

I’m not sure whether this helps, but I just realized that another plugin has exactly the same issue with their emails: Stop Spammers

The plugin has always been sending plain text info emails, but all line-breaks are now gone, exactly like @megabase described.

The issues have started all since I installed WP Mail SMTP to use an external mailer to avoid my mails ending up in the spam folder.

So there are two issues:

1) in plain text emails line breaks are gone (which I guess now is BP GES unrelated)
2) BP GES does not send out HTML emails even though BP does

Kind regards, Philip

Strothi
(@strothi)

5 months, 2 weeks ago

Dear @boonebgorges, @r-a-y ,

I’ve solved me issue! bp_email_use_wp_mail was indeed set to true by the filters that I applied as per the suggestion here: https://ast.io/html-emails-buddypress-bbpress/

I also noticed that I had another function in my functions.php to remove plain-text conversion for usage with WP Better Emails and similar plugins. By deleting that function as well as the code from the link above, now everything works as it should!

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

Kind regards, Philip

Plugin Author Boone Gorges
(@boonebgorges)

5 months, 2 weeks ago

Excellent! Thanks for letting us all know – others may benefit from similar debugging in the future.

Strothi
(@strothi)

5 months, 2 weeks ago

Dear @boonebgorges,

sure, you’re welcome. Unfortunately, I’ve now run into another major problem: Now that I can track my mails going out, I noticed that quite a large number of mails are actually not being sent out 🙁

Yesterday I send out my first weekly digest with the new setup and unfortunately it just went to about 170 instead of nearly 600 people.

To debug the issue, I sent two test mailings out today (as Admin Notices) to a smaller group of around 200 people. On the first try 70 emails went out, on the second, 64. Most emails were sent to the same people except for 7 emails going only out in the first mailing and 1 going out in the second mailing today.

Now I found this threat: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/daily-digest-not-sending-all-emails/ where a similar problem seems to have been discussed. So I checked, whether only “old” accounts are getting the mails, but that’s not entirely the case. Emails did not go to some of the “oldest” members of the test group, so I’m a bit at a loss.

Turns out, I have users who haven’t received any mail, I have some that got yesterday’s digest and I have some who have received all three mailings now?!

Also, when I check the Email Queue, I’m seeing only a few entries, instead of all group members. Is the queue meant to reflect all emails to be sent or just a snapshot of some?

I’ve now set up Debugging for BP GES as described here https://github.com/boonebgorges/buddypress-group-email-subscription/wiki/How-to-troubleshoot-missing-emails but I don’t want to spam my users a third time today, so I’ll have to report back next week what the debug log is showing. For my small test group with 3 users all works fine.

If you happen to have any idea in the meantime what I could do or which other test to run, let me know 🙂

Have a nice weekend.

Kind regards, Philip

Plugin Author Boone Gorges
(@boonebgorges)

5 months, 2 weeks ago

> Also, when I check the Email Queue, I’m seeing only a few entries, instead of all group members. Is the queue meant to reflect all emails to be sent or just a snapshot of some?

When you say “the Email Queue”, what do you mean? If you’re referring to the ?sum=1 preview, then this only shows (by default) 25 pending user digests. (You can pass comma-separated user_ids or a user_count to drill down.)

If you’re referring to database table wp_bpges_queued_items, then it should contain all pending emails.
– If the unsent emails are listed there, but have not been sent, then there’s probably a problem with the way that BPGES’s background processing works.
– If the unsent emails are NOT listed there, then it’s likely that BPGES is working properly, but there’s an issue with your mail sending service. I’ve seen this happen before, when integrating with services like Google Apps via SMTP – they set caps on how many emails can be sent in a given time period.

Strothi
(@strothi)

5 months, 2 weeks ago

Dear @boonebgorges,

thanks for your fast response! Ok, so that’s what I thought, the 25 are fine. Now, indeed I can see all the unsend emails in wp_bpges_queued_items – and now I realize that that problem has been around for quite some time, only I never realized the emails weren’t going out and my users never complaint, probably because they didn’t know we were sending mails in the first place 🙁

For the last three mailing, I counted the database rows and it matches exactly what I would expect: 508 for yesterday’s digest, 115 and 128 for today. And because I can see a lot of old queued items, the problem does not appear to be related to my SMTP setup, but rather to the background processing.

So, how can we debug that further then? 🙂
Strothi
(@strothi)

5 months, 2 weeks ago
Dear @boonebgorges,

I noticed that I could stop the sending of emails on the SMTP server side, so I tested again what happened with my two groups and debugging for BP GES on:

[26-Feb-2021 16:52:38] Finished sending immediate notifications for 7731. A total of 3 notifications were sent over all batches.
[26-Feb-2021 17:00:16] Beginning digest batch of type dig for timestamp 2021-02-26 17:00:15.
[26-Feb-2021 17:00:17] Finished digest run of type dig for timestamp 2021-02-26 17:00:15. Digests were sent to a total of 95 users.
[26-Feb-2021 17:00:18] Beginning digest batch of type dig for timestamp 2021-02-26 17:00:17.
[26-Feb-2021 17:00:19] Finished digest run of type dig for timestamp 2021-02-26 17:00:17. Digests were sent to a total of 95 users.

So now it looks like the processing is working fine and I’m even more confused than before. The 95×2 equal the 190 members in the group. I did send out a final test message this afternoon and for that I also have no items in wp_bpges_queued_items – suggesting to me that that should have worked, if not for my SMTP server being set to not send out any mails.

I’ll investigate this further when I send out another round of emails to my users…

Kind regards, Philip
- This reply was modified 5 months, 2 weeks ago by Strothi.
Plugin Author Boone Gorges
(@boonebgorges)

5 months, 1 week ago

Thanks for following up. Let me know if you find any more patterns in the log.
Strothi
(@strothi)

5 months, 1 week ago
Dear @boonebgorges,

so, the issue is still present 🙁 I just tried to send out the weekly digest to our 651 users and only 95 mails went out. The log from BP GES says the following:
```
[04-Mar-2021 12:46:45] Beginning batch of immediate notifications for 7761.
[04-Mar-2021 12:46:45] Finished sending immediate notifications for 7761. A total of 0 notifications were sent over all batches.
[04-Mar-2021 14:45:18] Beginning batch of immediate notifications for 7762.
[04-Mar-2021 14:45:18] Finished sending immediate notifications for 7762. A total of 2 notifications were sent over all batches.
[04-Mar-2021 15:18:03] Beginning batch of immediate notifications for 7763.
[04-Mar-2021 15:18:03] Finished sending immediate notifications for 7763. A total of 0 notifications were sent over all batches.
[04-Mar-2021 17:00:07] Beginning digest batch of type dig for timestamp 2021-03-04 17:00:04.
[04-Mar-2021 17:00:08] Finished digest run of type dig for timestamp 2021-03-04 17:00:04. Digests were sent to a total of 95 users.
[04-Mar-2021 17:00:09] Beginning digest batch of type dig for timestamp 2021-03-04 17:00:08.
[04-Mar-2021 17:00:10] Finished digest run of type dig for timestamp 2021-03-04 17:00:08. Digests were sent to a total of 95 users.
[04-Mar-2021 17:00:12] Beginning digest batch of type sum for timestamp 2021-03-04 17:00:10.
```
I can see that in the queue I have the remaining 556 entries 🙁

So essentially BP GES does not process any batches after the first one is sent. Even though the log appears to indicate that 2 batches were processed – unless I’m reading it wrong?

I also don’t have any errors in debug.log so I’m not sure why it’s not working. To recap, I’m using the following combination:

BP GES -> CronJob Scheduler -> Post SMTP Mailer -> Mailersend

I can see that Mailersend just sends out the first batch.

Any ideas what I can do to debug the issue?

Kind regards, Philip
Strothi
(@strothi)

5 months, 1 week ago

Dear @boonebgorges,

I hope you had a good weekend. Any idea on how to further debug and address my issue?

Kind regards, Philip

Strothi
(@strothi)

5 months ago

Dear @boonebgorges, dear @r-a-y,

I hope I find you well. I would truly appreciate if you could help me with this issue. As outlined above, I’m also happy to donate to the plugin development in return for assistance with the matter 🙂

Kind regards, Philip