Notifications Not Being Sent By Comment Mail When Comments Are Moderated

[patdumond]

A site owner reported that notifications of new subscriptions were not being sent by Comment Mail when WordPress Dashboard → Settings → Discussion → Before a Comment Appears is set to Comment must be manually approved.

I tested this thoroughly on my test site with the following configurations:

• Enable WordPress Dashboard → Settings → Discussion → Allow people to post comments on new articles and WordPress Dashboard → Settings → Discussion → Comment must be manually approved
• Enable Comment Mail with the following settings:
• Enable Allow New Subscriptions?
• Enable Mail Queue Processing?

I set up a test post for comments.

• Left one comment from a logged-in user.
• Left 2 comments by 2 different logged-out visitors.
• Checked Comment Mail Subscriptions Event Log: All three subscriptions were in the Subscriptions Event Log.
• Approved the moderated comments.
• All comments appeared on the test page.
• Checked Comment Mail Email Queue: the notifications for the 2 logged-out commenters appeared as Holding Until: "n/a; awaiting processing".
• Checked again in the morning. Holding Until messages had disappeared, but no emails were listed in the Comment Mail Mail Queue Event Log and no emails were received.
• Clicked Reconfirm on Comment Mail Subscriptions panel to try and resend confirmation messages. Both appeared immediately in Comment Mail Email Queue as Holding Until.
• Installed WP Mail SMTP plugin. Configured the plugin to use the PHP mail() function.
• Sent test emails to both logged-out visitor email addresses: they were sent and received.
• Clicked "Reconfirm" on Comment Mail Subscriptions panel to resend confirmation emails: immediately received confirmation emails and confirmed the subscriptions.
• Sent a comment from a third logged-out visitor.
• Approved the comment and confirmation email was immediately sent out and received.

Reference Private/Internal Ticket: https://websharks.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/11949

[jaswrks]

@patdumond writes...

Checked again in the morning. Holding Until messages had disappeared, but no emails were listed in the Comment Mail Mail Queue Event Log and no emails were received.

@patdumond @raamdev I walked through this in a recent video to show some extensive testing against this particular issue as well, and I tried to reproduce it in the latest Comment Mail dev branch for both lite and pro and I was unable to reproduce this behavior. It's working perfectly in my tests with moderation on and also with moderation off. Maybe the video will offer some insight or maybe you can spot something that I'm not doing that would help reproduce the bug.

📹 Video posted in Slack as Comment Mail Mysteries.

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@patdumond also writes..

• Approved the comment and confirmation email was immediately sent out and received.

You meant notification email here, right?

[patdumond]

@jaswsinc wrote: You meant notification email here, right?

Yes.