Approving a user (An error occurred while sending the email)

cycas · November 2006

My new install of Vanilla, downloaded and set up yesterday, has a minor puzzling problem: I'd be very grateful for any pointers in the right direction. When a user has requested an account and I go to approve the request, I get the error message below. One odd thing is that it doesn't seem to affect the functionality: the email does get sent and the user does get approved, but it would still be nice to know why it was happening and get it fixed! I am on PHP Version 4.3.11, MySQL 4.1.19 The error is: A fatal, non-recoverable error has occurred Technical information (for support personel): Error Message An error occurred while sending the email. Affected Elements Email.Send();

Minisweeper · November 2006

Are you using sendmail on your server or have you put in SMTP settings?

cycas · November 2006

I'm just using sendmail, nothing fancy. And it does send mail, so I assume it must be able to communicate with sendmail OK. I have an install of punbb on the same server, and that can send user approval emails and doesn't get hiccups doing it. I've now noticed that I don't get the error if I am already logged in and I go to approve users through the 'membership applicants' link in the menu. It only seems to happen if I log in and get presented with an applicant to approve from the login screen. That suggests to me that it might be a glitch in one file, but I can't work out which one?

cycas · December 2006

Weirdly, this error has now gone away. I swear I haven't done anything other that a few stylesheet tweaks! In the absence of any replies to this thread or further evidence, I'm going to assume that it was caused by something like an include failing to load properly, and that it was a coincidence that it happened several times when I was trying to approve users. Signed, mystified but happy!

aloke · February 2009

I get exactly the same error when I try to approve a request for membership, except that in my case the email actually does not go out and it happens every time! The error is: A fatal, non-recoverable error has occurred Technical information (for support personel): Error Message An error occurred while sending the email. Affected Elements Email.Send(); Anyone know why this happens and how to fix it?

pvalenca · June 2009

It now also happens to me. I use 'Applicant Email Verification' 0.4.2.b. Here is the complete page:

A fatal, non-recoverable error has occurred
Technical information (for support personel):
Error Message
An error occurred while sending the email.
Affected Elements
Email.Send();
The error occurred on or near: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. Please use the date.timezone setting, the TZ environment variable or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Europe/Berlin' for 'CEST/2.0/DST' instead
For additional support documentation, visit the Lussumo Documentation website at: lussumo.com/docs

After 6 hours of research I have found the solution in MY case. And the result is shocking, because the error message is completely unrelated to the actual cause! In my case the line SENDMAIL_PATH was completely missing in PHP.INI since the latest update of the server software. Here's the correct code in my php.ini. The appropriate code may be different in yours, but it's correct for default QNAP servers.

[mail function]
SMTP = localhost
smtp_port = 25
sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i

It affected ALL mail functions on my server. They all failed. This is logical, because not having the sendmail_path set implies that there is no mail function active at all.

I wonder why Vanilla comes with this weird error message text. Why not come with a text stating that mail() fails due to the fact that it is not active?!

Approving a user (An error occurred while sending the email)

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