For a week I’ve been quite happily sending campaigns every day to our 900 or so subscribers - today I sent the initial mailing but had to then send an amendment (basically a link got corrupted in the email which they needed to access) so I sent out a second campaign with the corrected web link - or so I thought - event log showed that the phpmailer failed to initiate.
OK, so I’ll send a test email just to see … and I get the dreaded “failed” message.
No matter how I search this forum I find no useful help on how to either fix this, explain why it happens or give any guidance on how to troubleshoot it.
I asked about help with the failed message a couple days ago and someone told me to turn on “define(‘PHPMAILER_SMTP_DEBUG’, 1);” in the config. Don’t know if that helps.
Thank you for that - I added that and it threw up a Troubleshooting guide for phpMailer itself which for someone with little to no technical know-how may as well have been written in braille. I picked phpList because it was supposed to be a powerful, free, open source solution - and for a week it was great!
Off to research and find an alternative or go back to MailChimp.
Just noticed this in your original post. Did you change anything else apart from the link in the campaign body? Often this problem is caused by using an invalid From address, or reaching a limit on the number of emails that can be sent.
No never changed anything at all other than the link.
I’ve since deleted the campaign and the queue is empty, tried then to start a new campaign and send a test message to myself and same “Error sending email to support@mydomain.com Could not instantiate mail function.”
You mention a limit on number of emails that can be sent?
That would be a restriction of your hosting account, but if you were sending 900 emails each day without problem then you won’t be hitting a limit now.
I suggest raising the problem with your hosting company.
In this case, of not sending through an smtp server, there isn’t really any diagnostic that phplist can show. Someone would need to look at the php error logs and maybe the web server log, which the hosting company might be able to do.
Oh, and the From and To addresses are valid, and have worked before?
thank you for your help. I’ve actually raised this with my host just waiting on a response. And yes the From and To addressees worked perfectly up till today.
Nothing worse than something working fine and then not for no apparent reason!