A new client called us this morning and told us that whenever someone tries registering on his website, he gets the following error:
Could not start mail function
The client was frustrated because he contacted two firms before contacting us, and both of these firms weren’t successful in resolving the problem.
So, the first thing that we tried to do was to reproduce the problem, which was easily done… We did notice though that the registration form wasn’t a basic Joomla registration form, but it was an RSForm which was connected to the Joomla’s users table through the RSForm Joomla User Registration Plugin (in other words, when someone fills in the RSForm registration form and submits it successfully, a profile for that person will be created in the users table).
Initially, we thought the problem was related to the server’s environment, and so we started digging in that direction. But we then ruled out this possibility because we were able to send emails to any email account from a PHP script that we created. We then looked at the configuration settings and we noticed that the Mailer was set to PHP Mail, which was what it should be… We then started testing the form more thoroughly, and we noticed that for some reason, some emails did get through and some emails didn’t – but in any case, the form submission took about 15-20 seconds. Hmmm…
We kept working on the issue for a couple of hours until we discovered that the problem was that the registration form was trying to send emails on behalf of emailaddress@aol.com (we thought it was sending emails on behalf of a local email, but we were wrong). As we have explained before, mails can be blocked by the receiving server if the sender IP is not in the SPF records. Clearly, aol.com did not have the IP of our client’s server in their SPF records, and that’s why the mails were failing.
But, why was it that some mails were going through?
Well, it was because some mail servers do not do any SPF check on the sending server; they just allow any email to go through.
Isn’t the error “could not start mail function” a bit misleading?
Yes – it’s very misleading, but the thing is that PHP usually doesn’t wait for a response from the receiving server, but, in some cases (depending on the sending server environment), it does (which is the case for our client, hence the 15-20 seconds it takes to submit the registration form), and so the PHP mail function fails, and so the wrapping Joomla function returns this erroneous error (isn’t that an oxymoron?).
So, what did we do to fix the problem?
- We logged in to the backend of the Joomla website.
-
We navigated to Components-> RS Form Pro -> [Form Name] -> Properties -> Admin Emails
-
We then changed the From email to admin@ourclientjoomlawebsite.com
-
We saved the form and that fixed the problem!
What if I’m not using RSForm?
Well, if you’re not using RSForm and you’re just using Joomla’s built-in registration form, then make sure that the From Email under the Mail Settings in the Global Configuration settings is set to a local email if you’re using PHP Mail as the Mailer (by local email we mean an email which domain has the IP of your server in its SPF records).
If you have the same problem when people are trying to register on your website then make sure that the IP of your mail server is allowed to send emails on behalf of the domain in the from email. If you are sure that everything’s OK on your end but you are still getting this error, then you can always contact us and we’ll solve the problem for you in no time and for a very, very affordable fee!