magento not sending out any mails, how to debug?

Question

Magento is not sending out any emails, transnational, contact form gives error

 cannot send your mail at this moment

I checked

• Mail setup in magento, all email accounts are set in settings
• php mail works fine a test.php with php mail sends out a message
• checked my mailserver logs but see nothing there no errors

• /var/log/system.log and exception.log shows only an error not the cause of the error

  exception 'Zend_Mail_Transport_Exception' with message 'Unable to send mail. ' in /var/webshop/httpdocs/lib/Zend/Mail/Transport/Sendmail.php:137

Answer 1

I ran into this problem when Magento was not sending out forgot password emails (yet reporting it did to the user) then after looking in /var/log/exception.log found the error it was generating was:

2012-05-30T04:27:54+00:00 ERR (3): 
exception 'Exception' with message 'This letter cannot be sent.' in /home/magento/www/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Email/Template.php:354
Stack trace:
#0 /home/magento/www/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Email/Template.php(463): Mage_Core_Model_Email_Template->send(Array, Array, Array)
#1 /home/magento/www/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Email/Template/Mailer.php(79): Mage_Core_Model_Email_Template->sendTransactional('customer_passwo...', 'support', Array, Array, Array, '1')
#2 /home/magento/www/app/code/core/Mage/Customer/Model/Customer.php(646): Mage_Core_Model_Email_Template_Mailer->send()
#3 /home/magento/www/app/code/core/Mage/Customer/Model/Customer.php(663): Mage_Customer_Model_Customer->_sendEmailTemplate('customer/passwo...', 'customer/passwo...', Array, '1')
#4 /home/magento/www/app/code/core/Mage/Customer/controllers/AccountController.php(554): Mage_Customer_Model_Customer->sendPasswordResetConfirmationEmail()
#5 /home/magento/www/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Action.php(420): Mage_Customer_AccountController->forgotPasswordPostAction()
#6 /home/magento/www/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Router/Standard.php(250): Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Action->dispatch('forgotpasswordp...')
#7 /home/magento/www/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Front.php(176): Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Router_Standard->match(Object(Mage_Core_Controller_Request_Http))
#8 /home/magento/www/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/App.php(349): Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Front->dispatch()
#9 /home/magento/www/app/Mage.php(640): Mage_Core_Model_App->run(Array)
#10 /home/magento/www/index.php(84): Mage::run('default', 'store')
#11 {main}

So opened up /app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Email/Template.php and found the code that was throwing this error (on line 354) was:

if (!$this->isValidForSend()) {
    Mage::logException(new Exception('This letter cannot be sent.')); // translation is intentionally omitted
    return false;
}

So had a look at isValidForSend():

public function isValidForSend()
{
    return !Mage::getStoreConfigFlag('system/smtp/disable')
        && $this->getSenderName()
        && $this->getSenderEmail()
        && $this->getTemplateSubject();
}

Added some logging of the variables at the start of the function as one of these must be returning false:

Mage::Log(var_export(!Mage::getStoreConfigFlag('system/smtp/disable'),true).';'.var_export($this->getSenderName(),true).';'.var_export($this->getSenderEmail(),true).';'.var_export($this->getTemplateSubject(),true),null,'email.log');

Which creates the log file /var/log/email.log which had:

2012-05-30T04:44:37+00:00 DEBUG (7): false;'CustomerSupport';'[email protected]';'Password Reset Confirmation for {{var customer.name}}'

So the problem was: !Mage::getStoreConfigFlag('system/smtp/disable') which you can fix up in Admin > System > Configuration > Advanced > System > Mail Sending Settings and change Disable Email Communications to No so the emails are NOT disabled.

Now it works :)

Answer 2

Any php program can do a half-decent job of sending out some email with phpmail.

Given the error message, What your Magento build is trying to do is different - use Sendmail via the Zend library.

You will need to build and test your sendmail installation. Or use some other mail service such as gmail and get Magento to use that.

To test whether it is you, your computer or Magento, put some other program such as Roundcube Mail on there. If Roundcube Mail can send mail then you will know Sendmail is working, if not then you will know the problem is in Sendmail.

Fixing your Sendmail is distro specific.