All notification emails stopped working on phpbb

Hello!

I have an active phpbb forums hosted at your site at thecrimsonclover.org. Everything has been fine until now. Recently, without doing any changes to the phpbb, the notification emails for the forums stopped working. No one receives emails for replies to current topics, new topics made or PM received etc. I can't remember that I would've done anything in the ACP prior to this starting, also can't recall how long it has been going on. Suddenly just realised that I haven't received emails altho there have been new messages in the forums.

I checked the ACP error logs, no errors relating to emails. I produced an error after I changed the email settings to use SMTP but that went away after I changed the settings back.

The error was this, but as I said it's not displayed anymore after I changed the settings back, and yet no emails arrive to the members of the forums.

Email error
» EMAIL/SMTP
/TheCrimsonClover/memberlist.php

Could not get mail server response codes.
Backtrace

Connecting to localhost:25

I ran this troubleshooting support.php I found somewhere.

Email Settings
Enable board-wide e-mails: Enabled
Users send e-mails via board: Enabled
E-mail function name: mail
E-mail package size: 20
E-mail chunk size: 50
E-mail queue interval: 60 secs
Contact e-mail address: crimsoncloverchitose@gmail.com
Contact name:
Return e-mail address: crimsoncloverchitose@gmail.com
Hide e-mail addresses: Yes
Use SMTP server for e-mail: No

After I noticed this problem I have updated the phpbb from 3.1.3 to 3.1.4 yesterday 8th of may, but the email problem existed before this update.

Anyone have any tips how to fix this?

I changed the email address on the forums from crimsoncloverchitose@gmail.com to thecrimsonclover@altervista.org. I also did whatever tips I could find online to fix this, amongs them:
- Purging cache
- Purging sessions
- Marking out flush in cron.php and then enabling it again
- Changing email package size to 0
- Changing flood limit or timer to 0
- Changing queue interval to 10
- Disabling and then enabling board-wide emails
and some other things which I already forgot I did.

For some reason soon after I changed the email on the board to @altervista.org ending, the notifications started working on 10th of May. They worked for three days and then stopped working again on 13th of May. Again, no errors in the error log and I did nothing in ACP or anywhere before the issue started again. This issue is really annoying, does anyone have any tips I could try?

[saitfainder]

From our point of view everything is working fine and mail are correctly sent. Maybe your mails are tagged as spam and put into the spam folder?

You can try to ask your users to add your forum's email address into their contact list.

I have personally added the email address to the contact list on my email account. When the emails did come through, they appeared in the spam folder before I added the address to contact list. When this issue is about (there was that 3 day thing in the middle of it when the mails did arrive and then stopped again) the mails never reach the recipient. They don't appear in the inbox nor the spam folder, they just never arrive. Yesterday I tested things and sent myself 2 private messages. Just noticed that I did receive the emails for them, but they arrived today at 13.29, when I sent the PM's yesterday at 8.59. Our forums currently have 2 new messages on the threads, and I haven't received the notifications for those. The messages were posted yesterday. I also have tried sending myself PM's to my other account now and then, and usually the notifications never arrive. I'm getting confused even myself now, sometimes the messages arrive and most of the times they don't. I'm not the only one who isn't receiving the messages, and others check their spam folder too like I do.

I have tried a lot of things to fix this email issue. I have posted about this on the phpbb forums, you can read the thread here and see what I have done so far to try to fix this issue. I wish someone could just help me fix this, it's really annoying.

I want to say again how this started.
The emails worked, then they stopped working. I had done nothing unusual in the forums prior to them stopping. After waiting for days I did some various things (of which most are listed in the phpbb forums thread) and the emails started working again. They worked for 3 days and then stopped working again, again I did nothing unusual prior to this. I have since tried the same things as last time and nothing has helped.

The emails are still not working. I don't even remember what I have tried and what not.
I changed queue_interval to 0 and package size to 120 (it being on 0 didn't help either), I set cron jobs on manual so I run them through the cron status extension (Run periodic tasks from system cron: Yes)... I'm not sure where the problem lies, if you tell me that from the hosts side everything works. The only emails I do receive are the ones through the contact admin form on the forums. Nothing else arrives, no other notifications. And the users aren't getting the user activation emails either. This is so frustrating, because none of the changes I make are fixing this Could someone do an indepth help session on this with me sometime to check that the settings are correct for what the host needs etc? I really want this fixed!

I have a question also. Does altervista provide the use of SMTP server, and if so what are the details? I haven't tried that yet.

We managed to get the emails working in the end.

In phpbb we found that when we removed the $msg variable from the mail function (found in include/function_messanger.php) and replaced it with our own custom message then the emails would send without any problems. We still don't really know why this worked but thought we would post this here in case anyone has a similar problem.