Having problems validating delivery server

[Jaggs]

Hi,

When I add in the delivery server address (e.g. admin@domain.com) and press the Validate Server button, it all seems to work OK, but no email appears to be sent to the address. Do I need to set up a customer first or something? Thanks.

 

[frm.mwz]

Hi,

When I add in the delivery server address (e.g. admin@domain.com) and press the Validate Server button, it all seems to work OK, but no email appears to be sent to the address. Do I need to set up a customer first or something? Thanks.

Could be various things, incl 3rd party block, or general mail block by your host or firewall settings of your server, etc.
Have you done all as in the quick start guide and manual?
Can you send from that address in general (not using mwz)?

 

[Jaggs]

Hi, thanks for the response. The email sends fine in general, just not in MWZ. I've tried to set it all up as per the guides, but it's still not happening. It gives the right response (check your email verification link or something), but nothing ever arrives. MailWizz is just not sending any email or it's getting blocked somewhere en route (I checked webmail for the domain as well).

Or I have a configuration set up wrongly.

 

[frm.mwz]

Hi, thanks for the response. The email sends fine in general, just not in MWZ. I've tried to set it all up as per the guides, but it's still not happening. It gives the right response (check your email verification link or something), but nothing ever arrives. MailWizz is just not sending any email or it's getting blocked somewhere en route (I checked webmail for the domain as well).

Or I have a configuration set up wrongly.

So when you with that email account in question from say ThurnderBird, does that work?

Have a look into error logs of mwz, server, 3rd party smtp, etc, or what it says directly on the dashboard when an error happens.
Post exact error messages or screenshots so that specific help can be offered.
You could also test various authentication methods to see which works (TLS, SSL, etc).

 

[Jaggs]

When I send an email using my client, it goes through fine. But when I try verifying it fails to send anything, although the verify page looks OK. See image.

 

[frm.mwz]

When I send an email using my client, it goes through fine. But when I try verifying it fails to send anything, although the verify page looks OK. See image.

It says inactive, so you need to go to the edit option and do whatever is needed to verify it.
Quote back here the exact error message, so tha specific help can be given.

 

[Jaggs]

Hi, thanks very much for your help, however we seem to be going around and around here?

If I knew how to verify the domain I would have done that already, surely? And I am not getting any errors messages, which is the problem.

Another MAJOR problem is there are absolutely no clear guidelines on how to get this thing working. I have been doing Sendy installations for a while now, and this system is really horrible in terms of user friendliness compared to Sendy.

All we get is a few paltry tooltips, a few demo videos with no audio, and a Getting Started Guide which is worse than useless. I am getting close to the point where I will be asking for a refund, because this installation procedure is fundamentally sub-optimal.

Thanks.

 

[twisted1919]

@Jaggs - After you install the app you get a step by step tour on what you have to do to get started. I cannot hold your hand though. The instructions are way more than whatever sendy provides. Also there is a good knowledgebase with great info, one just has to look over.
As far as adding the servers, i don't see what instruction you need, the fields are self explanatory and they also offer tooltips that more or less helpful for some, but the info is there.
So as far as documentation goes, there is no reason for one to complain, if he does, then it's clearly that he didn't even tried to look into it.

Now to your issue, if the app says it sent the email, then it actually did it. The fact the email is stuck somewhere after it left the app is really not under it's control. Sometimes the emails can land in the spam folder, so that's a place to look if you haven't.
if it's not there either, then ask your hosting what's the deal.

 

[Jaggs]

Hi, and thanks very much for your time. I appreciate that you must be very busy with a million things to sort out. Apologies for being snarky too. First here's my verification screen.

Regarding your product, I am afraid the level of user guides is rather poor from where I am sitting. And yes I am a dumb user, although I have been writing about tech for over 15 years, so I am not a complete incompetent. Although I cannot code, I do spend a lot of time evaluating user guides and ease of use.

I do feel that your guides could definitely be better. Let's just look at your Getting started guide and I will give a couple of examples. Overall the main problem is you have no example screen grabs, so we do not know what is supposed to be going on in each scenario.

1.

What is the name of the configuration file?

2.

This is my delivery server set up page. The tooltips give very basic informtation, and once again no clear screen grabs are given in the Getting Started Guide to help with seeing what the settings should be. Makes it very much a guessing game. It doesn't help that some of your tooltips get lost (on my screen at least) off the edge of the page. See example below.

3.As for error messages, I do not get any. Here is what happens when I try to validate the server as per the instructions on screen -

http://screencast.com/t/r7saIfAbls2b

It seems to send, but it doesn't do anything at all (because nothing arrives in my inbox). I have checked the email inboxes (and spam) and nothing arrives, and I know the email works, because I have done multiple tests to send emails from my client (Gmail) and they arrived perfectly well.

4. Now you may say I am stupid, which is fair enough, but so far I have spent two or three days, including numerous emails to my webhost (Knownhost.com) trying to fix this by opening ports etc, and nothing has worked. And I am just a very ordinary Joe. I would gently suggest that maybe you could improve your on-boarding considerably to avoid this sort of stuff happening with other users should your product become more popular over time.

All the best.

 

[twisted1919]

@Jaggs -
1. If you're talking about the getting started guide from http://www.mailwizz.com/quick-start-user-guide/ , that's super super old, not updated in years since we have this forums and a good knowledgebase: https://kb.mailwizz.com/article-categories/getting-started/ So i guess you just landed on the wrong documentation. (p.s: i have just placed a redirect to the kb from the old docs)
2. The off-screen tooltips is an issue i fixed yesterday, my bad for that.
3. That actually looks good, and as i said, if the app says it sent the email, the it did, most likely something is off after it leaves your server.
4. I couldn't ever say such thing

Here's the thing, all your settings are fine, which means you had it working from the first time. The issue is that the email leaves the server and never arrives the destination, which is the thing that kept you behind till now.

Anyway, i see this is using mailgun, have you had a look inside the mailgun dashboard to see if the emails reach there?
Contacting them about this might also be a solution, they are very responsive.

Let me know about the above and we can pick it from there.
Thanks.

 

[Jaggs]

Hi, well I contacted Mailgun, and they said they had changed IP, but again that has done nothing. So it still isn't working. Sigh.

I've just checked their logs and the email is getting to them (yay!) but then it's getting dropped with this error -

"Failed: admin@pushpaka.net → admin@pushpaka.net 'Please validate this server.' Server response: 550 550 Verification failed for <bounce+15bf42.e4fd9e-admin=pushpaka.net@pushpaka.net> No Such User Here" Sender verify failed"

So I guess it's either at my webhost or at Mailgun?

Nigel

 

[frm.mwz]

Hi, well I contacted Mailgun, and they said they had changed IP, but again that has done nothing. So it still isn't working. Sigh.

I've just checked their logs and the email is getting to them (yay!) but then it's getting dropped with this error -

"Failed: admin@pushpaka.net → admin@pushpaka.net 'Please validate this server.' Server response: 550 550 Verification failed for <bounce+15bf42.e4fd9e-admin=pushpaka.net@pushpaka.net> No Such User Here" Sender verify failed"

So I guess it's either at my webhost or at Mailgun?

Nigel

If I remember correctly, you need to go to mailgun and validate your part (domain/email). It should tell you in their interface.

 

[Jaggs]

Thanks. Yes, we've done that already.

 

[frm.mwz]

Thanks. Yes, we've done that already.

So it works and is resolved?

 

[Jaggs]

No. And that's the problem. I have now contacted my webhost company again to see if there's anything strange at their end.

 

[frm.mwz]

My hunch is, reading from the error message
(where the FROM address found by mailgun seems to be <bounce+15bf42.e4fd9e-admin=pushpaka.net@pushpaka.net>)
that you might get it to work if you make sure the
verified sender (the FROM address you registered in mailgun)
is forced as the FROM address in mailwizz: admin@pushpaka.net
You can set this in delivery server settings (and check also campaign settings).
(Not sure if you applied all patches, as it could be due to that as well, as some are under development. But try the above and see what error message you get and post it back here please.)

 

[Jaggs]

I didn't set a verified FROM address in Mailgun. Just a verified domain. Not sure that I installed any patches either. Was not promted to during installation or after.

 

[frm.mwz]

Is this forced as the FROM address in mailwizz: admin@pushpaka.net?
You can set this in delivery server settings (and check also campaign settings).

Check function of admin@pushpaka.net by sending an email to it (see above error message could concern this email address).
Check header of sent campaign by using another delivery server, but keep all other things same (and then see if forced FROM works or is as in above error message <bounce...>).
Check if the above email address is in mailgun's "Manage SMTP credentials".
Check mailgun's "Security Settings for Outgoing Mail" (as they mention if it these do not work '...the message will fail and not be delivered').

As to the patches, I listed the here for convenient access
https://forum.mailwizz.com/posts/14649
It is important to see-thru these threads for additional posts with further updates as it is re patches (not full version releases).

 

[frm.mwz]

Just tested mailgun settings on my end (I use other smtp usually). Here is what works for me (delivery server verification incl test email, then extra test campaigns):

in mwz
hostname: smtp.mailgun.org, protocol: TLS, port: 587

in mailgun
TLS connection: opportunistic
certificate verification: not required

When I tried with their supplied IP, or with certificate verification, or port 465, or SSL: it did not work; but the above does. All campaign inboxed 100%


Here are some other settings used:
(sent two test campaigns for both settings)
with
delivery server settings:
Force FROM: always or never
Reply-To email: as FROM or empty
Force Reply-To: always or never
and
campaign settings:
from (as on delivery server) = reply-to

the resulting header is:
Return-Path: <bounce...
From: from (as on delivery server) = reply-to
Reply-To: from (as on delivery server) = reply-to

So in conclusion, there has to be something either with mailwizz (since the <bounce... ends up as FROM it seems from your error message), or perhaps with the admin@pushpaka email

 

[Jaggs]

Thanks very much for your response. In fact Mailgun replied to my support request with the final answer -

"
The error (which is called Sender Address Verification) that you are seeing is due to the recipient server performing a MX lookup on the envelope.mail-from address and failing to find the records for the domain pushpaka.net Some email servers check the domain in this envelope.mail-from field for MX records, and if the records do not exist or if they do not point to the service from which you are sending (i.e. Mailgun), the email servers reject the message.

Therefore, by adding Mailgun's MX records to your domain (which is the best way to address this issue), the MX lookups of those email servers should succeed, and the servers will accept your messages."

So I need to add those two MX records or even set up a sub-domain to get clearance for the messages. Really just a huge palaver. With SES I just set up a few settings and bingo email domains or addresses were verified and off we went. I'm wondering whether there's not a better mailserver solution I've missed somewhere else.

But thanks again for your patience and assistance.