Ecommerce Templates > General Help > Email troubleshooting

Email troubleshooting - ASP Version

Most people won't require the information here and emails will be sent automatically. However if you are having problems, this is what you need to do.

Firstly, log in to your admin section and go to the Admin Main page.
The email address you set in the "Email address:" section is very important. It has to be an address on the same domain as your website as this is a security feature for most hosts to avoid SPAM. For instance if your website is www.yourwebsite.com then an email address on that domain would be say info@yourwebsite.com.

You should see a section "Email Object". In the drop down list you will see a list of the available email objects that are installed on your server. If you don't see any available email objects in the list, then you need to ask your host if they can install an email object for sending email from an ASP page like for instance
CDONTS
CDO
ASP Email (PERSITS)
ASP Mail (ServerObjects)
JMail (Dimac)
SMTPMail (SoftArtisans)

Ok, so now you can choose an email object in your admin main page. The best one to try first is CDONTS, as it doesn't require any further configuration. Set the email object to CDONTS and then press submit at the bottom of the admin main page, and try an "email friend" to yourself. If you receive the email you are all set.

Email Objects other than CDONTS require the SMTP server to be set on your admin main page. If you are not sure, just ask your host what Email Object / SMTP server setting to use. If using CDO (which is installed by default now on Windows servers) for your Email Object then common values for the SMTP server may be localhost, 127.0.0.1 or no value set at all.

If you still can't get email to work, please ask your host if they have a test script for sending email from an ASP page. Once you have tried the test script using one of the email objects that we support (listed above), send us an email with your FTP login details and URL of the test script and we will have a look at why emails are not working from your Ecommerce Plus template.

One other important note. You need a properly configured mailserver to send emails from an ASP page. For this reason, don't worry about emails if you are testing on your local machine. It will come together when you publish to your host.

Godaddy (ASP / Windows users): In the main admin settings page try the following combination

Email object: CDO
Server: smtpout.secureserver.net

or

Server: relay-hosting.secureserver.net

Gmail Business email users: In the main admin settings page use the following

Email Confirmation: checked
Email address:"you@yourdomain.com
Email Object: CDO
SMTP Server: smtp.gmail.com
Username: your gmail business email
Password: your gmail password

and then add this to vsadmin/includes.asp

smtpserverport=465
smtpusessl=TRUE

Email troubleshooting - PHP Version

Why can't I receive an email from "email a friend"?

The first thing to check is that the SMTP server is set up correctly for PHP on your host. If that's ok then the problem may be that you have to set an email address in your main admin page is a valid email on the domain. For example if your domain is:
www.yourdomain.com
then an email like
info@yourdomain.com
...is ok. But something like
info@anotherdomain.com
...will not be.

Hosts that support non-standard email headers

You can set the parameter $customheaders in your vsadmin/includes.php file for hosts that require non-standard email headers. Instances of %from% will be replaced by the "From:" address and instances of "%to%" (not normally needed) will be replaced by the "To:" address. For example . . .

$customheaders = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\nFrom: %from%\r\nReply-To: %replyto%\r\nContent-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";

or for HTML emails

$customheaders = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\nFrom: %from%\r\nReply-To: %replyto%\r\nContent-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";

Email Authentication using PHPMailer

If you are not receiving emails from your store and your host suggests that outgoing emails require authentication then go to the Email Settings section in your store Admin Main Settings page.

Email SMTP Service = Use PHP Mailer
SMTP Username = will often be your business email address, the same as you entered in the Email Address
SMTP Password = your email account Password
SMTP Host = will often be mail.yourbusiness.com
SMTP Port = 587
Email "From" Name = without this, the email message will be received as From : Root User.

And now test and you should be sending authenticated emails.

Gmail Business email users: Use PHPMailer as above with the following settings in vsadmin/includes.php

Email SMTP Service = Use PHP Mailer
SMTP Username = you@youremail.com // valid e-mail account for authentication
SMTP Password = your email account Password
SMTP Host = smtp.gmail.com
SMTP Port = 465
SMTP Secure = ssl

More troubleshooting

There is a little known parameter that can be added to vsadmin/includes.php...

$emailcr="\n";

...which will use carriage returns instead of carriage return / line feeds for emails.

The reason is here - http://es.php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php

Note: If messages are not received, try using a LF (\n) only. Some poor quality Unix mail transfer agents replace LF by CRLF automatically (which leads to doubling CR if CRLF is used). This should be a last resort, as it does not comply with » RFC 2822.

If this parameter doesn't work for you, please do remove it from includes.php

If your host suggests you need to set the -f flag, use the following in vsadmin/includes.php

$emailflags='-f%from%';

General problems

The URL for the product link from the email a friend option is not correct - what's up?

Check that the base URL in your main admin page is correct - this will probably be something like http://www.mysite.com

Why don't I get email notification of sales through PayPal?

The PayPal Instant Payment Notification has probably not been set up. There are details about it here