Some registered users may have received email notifications with a new temporary password. This is because until just a few minutes ago, many emails from this site were being blocked by our upstream ISP (Rogers) due to some issues with the headers in those emails. Likely this has prevented many users from registering and submitting comments .. but it is all working great now.
If you are running wordress on a debian-based system, and your ISP does implement good controls around outbound email (like ours), feel free to reach out to me here on ways in which you can work to get your specific configuration working the way you want it to. In particular, among the big residential ISPs (Bell, Rogers, Cogeco) there are differences in their outbound email policies, and I support blogs running on each of these. Rogers provides a more technically sound solution in the residential arena, however it requires stricter local configuration to work properly and their customer service does not have the technical knowledge to easily support what their engineers have in place. For us, there are a number of configuration factors in play, namely:
- Correct configuration of our MX records in DNS
- Alignment of MTA daemon configured hostname to those MX records
- SPF records that contain all our sending hosts, including ISP SMTP servers
- Registration of valid senders on mail servers, including upstream ISP SMTP servers
- Proper configuration to allow authentication with upsteam ISP SMTP servers
- Proper re-writing on the local webserver for all outbound email (corrected today)
Notably outbound mail on Bell generally works even if you mess up or do not complete #2, #4 and #5. I had been testing using my local email domain, bypassing some ISP checks related to #6, until today. Just a few years ago email worked fine ignoring all these steps and I expect that some day soon all ISPs will require all steps, as it no doubt enables more spam senders.
For debian-based hosting setup as a satellite with an ISP smarthost, I have found exim4-daemon-light the easiest to configure to manage everything outside the DNS configuration for successful Wordpress email integration with any of these ISPs. I may post a more comprehensive HOWTO based on our setup. Until I do that, reel free to register here, and peek at the headers of our emails _ nothing was done to any Wordpress configuration; It all happens in the backend MTA, noting that we also run Wordpress in a multi-site configuration.
