PHPJunkyard support forum

I am not receiving notifications of new postings to my PHP Guestbook sent to me by e-mail which I then have to approve as per the 'man_approval' setting. The messages do end up in the apptmp directory; it's just that notification isn't send to me to approve them.

This only started happening in the last couple of days. This was working fine for about a month, and prior to that (ignoring the year from June 2016-June 2017, when I was using some other software) for months, if not years. I hadn't made any changes in any of the settings or other files in the directory where the Guestbook is located.

I asked the people where my WWW site is hosted if there were any changes with the Apache server there or anything else which might be causing a problem, and they said no. Presumably there is some default mail server or software on the Apache server which is used to send these approval messages to me based on my e-mail address in the settings ('admin_email').

In the other software I was using for about a year as per the above, there was also some place where you would put in an e-mail address to contact you and the program would send e-mail via the Apache server. I tried sending myself an e-mail this way, and it worked fine.

Instead of the usual 'admin_email' address I was using, I switched to another one that I have at Hotmail, and that didn't work either. I also checked various Spam and Junk mailboxes along the way where these messages might have ended up, and they weren't there.

I reinstalled the guestbook in a new directory using the current version of the Guestbook software (1.8.2) and then copied over some files from the previous version, i.e., the headers file, and made some minor modifications to some of the files such as were in the previous directory. While comments which are posted without my approval appear with no problem, those which are supposed to be sent to me to approve still are not being sent by e-mail.

Are there any other settings which would affect how the Apache mail server works (or does not work) than the 'man_approval' one? Is there anything I can do after logging in to the Apache server where my guestbook is hosted like typing some commands which might help to troubleshoot this problem?

As you said yourself - it was working fine and suddenly stopped. Nothing in the code changed, something on the server did.

Set it up like it was when working then trace the email error; it's either a spam filter in effect or some other error that should be logged in the mail transfer agent log (for example in Exim log). You will probably need root server access (your hosting company) to check Exim logs.

Predictably, everything started working again yesterday with the notifications, so there was obviously something screwy on the server which the people at my hosting site were not able to uncover.

Thanks for your suggestions. They are a bit too technical for me (and probably beyond my reach in terms of access). I will save them for the next time this happens...

See my recent post "re: spam and email". While your ISP said there wasn't a problem, I bet they reset
your spam score and it started working. The script gbook.php is now considered a high spam candidate
and gets blocked on the ISP's email servers that only they control.