I am now 3 days without email on my site. I have attempted to work with Hostek on this issue and they are not helping at all.

When I test Email Friend, I get this pop-up message: I'm sorry. We are experiencing temporary difficulties at the moment. Please try again later.

PLEASE HELP!!!

Kelley

Ecommerce PlusASP v7.7.2

Hi Kelley, there is some troubleshooting here - https://www.ecommercetemplates.com/help/email-help.asp but unless they have changed some settings on the server, then there may be some other issue besides the settings.

David

Hi Dave,

Yeah, I think all my settings are correct, but then, since the server change they could be different, but I can't seem to get the correct information from Hostek.

Kelley

Why can't I get help with this? It is probably obvious that I need a new hosting company, but before I can make that huge switch, I need to get this fixed! My customers are not getting their order confirmation emails or any other kind of updates for their orders.

Kelley

Hi Kelley, I just responded to your most recent email.
I know this is difficult for you.
I don't think there is anything that can be done from this end really, but if you want to get me in the control panel, I can try some different settings.
With .asp, there is really not much to it.
It's one of two settings - CDONTS (none) or CDO, from there, the settings you would normally use to setup POP3 emails in an email client like Thunderbird.

Are you able to send an receive emails from the address used on your store?
Does the domain in the email address match the store web address?
Is this email account hosted with your host, or elsewhere?

Thanks,
David

Just jumping in here and throwing this out FWIW:

I had the same issues and more with other hosting companies in the past. Very frustrating when they don't reply to your needs.

I switched to ServeLink a long time ago and am VERY happy with them.

Customer service is great if you do have a problem (very rare) and they understand ECT and how it works.

You can't go wrong.

https://servelink.com/

Also: From what you have said with your issues... it definitely sounds like it's a Hosting problem... not ECT

Just my $.02 worth.

Patrick

Thanks, Patrick, I appreciate your input very much!

David, my store settings have not changed at all from the time it was working, just 4 days ago. Hostek has had me try different settings with the SSL and TLS (it's always been set to None, previously) They had me try different SMTP port numbers, but to no avail. None of their suggested combinations worked. The server used to just be the IP address, now they had me change it to mail.mydomain.com; that didn't work. The email address is the same as my domain and it is hosted with Hostek. The password is set to YES and is correct (I even went in and changed it to make sure). The email object has always been set to CDO; I tried None, but it didn't make a difference.

I'm up early this morning. Hostek tech help has still not responded to my open ticket with them since 9 am yesterday. That's when they finally responded to my request for an ASP test script. I had found one on their site, going through it for some kind of answer, but it didn't work because we have a redirect set up for a 401. David, the tech help du jour, said "Looking at the source of this script, it would appear that you are attempting to relay messages through your mail server." Really??? Then crickets.

Kelley

While I don't have Kelley's pain with the email issue, my site is also on Hostek servers and they did recently do a big DNS change. I'm not sure how you have your name servers setup but that might be worth looking into.

If you have your DNS pointing to (as an example) something like NS1.HOSTEK.COM then the migration should be fairly seamless in theory because it's all managed there. If you have a separate MX record that was pointing to something else, maybe an IP that they migrated to a different number, then that might be worth looking into.

Also, side note, since Hostek was bought out by a different company there has been a lot of turnover there and the customer support has been atrocious for me. I've looked into other hosting companies but haven't pulled the trigger...yet. They are likely bleeding customers due to poor service and the recent Google reviews shows it. It's a shame, I've been with them for 10 years and for the first 9-ish or so they were great.

Yes, they did change our IP address. Previously, we had the parameters set to our IP address for the SMTP server. Now, they had us change it to mail.mydomain.com. I've tried it both ways, and it fails. The MX records are all pointing to their servers. I could try that, in the DNS Editor for our site, they have two MX records, smtp.secureserver.net [pref 0] and mailstore1.secureserver.net [pref 10].

Oh my gosh! I just tried the smtp.secureserver.net and it worked!!! Oh happy day!!!

sparksm, thank you so much! I looked at those before but just didn't try them. Duh!

Kelley

secureserver.net is Go Daddy.
So is Hosttek owned by them now? Or they are a reseller perhaps.

David

Wow. I didn't even think of that, Dave. Somehow, it is working, though. I even checked the Email Friend script and it works on that setting. Unless, the emails that I'm using to text it are the ones that I have on GD servers! Ugh! Now, I'm totally confused! I need to move away from this hosting company ASAP!

Kelley

Hi Kelley,

I just tried email a friend and didn’t receive any email I’m afraid.

Steve

Hi Steve,

Yes, I set the main settings back to mail.mydomain.com and it doesn't work. They're asking me for the mail script used for the Email Friend. emailfriend.asp is blank.

Vince, can I get the script so I can give it Hostek so that it can be proven to them that it isn't a bad script but their servers that are messed up?

Thanks,
Kelley

Hi Kelley
The email friend script is mixed up with a whole load of other code so it's a bit difficult to just send them the script. But we could do this the other way round. Could you ask them to pop a script on the server that does work, and then let me know the site FTP login (vince AT ecommercetemplates DOT com) and I'll use the settings they have in their script for your email.

Vince

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Chris, at Hostek, was finally able to fix the email problem for me. It had to do with the SPF and DKIM DNS records on their server.

Thanks for your help. I'm so glad this nightmare is over.

Kelley