Emailing from PHP no longer working (Lightsail)

balthazaurus 2020-02-28 21:39:56 UTC #1

Keywords: General - AWS - Technical issue - Other
bnsupport ID: c6a33a3a-8666-0d57-2b6f-13570b9bd53a
Description:
I send a small number of notification emails from a php (CakePHP) application running on Lightsail. It has been working without issues (except that emails take a long time to arrive; unsure if related) for several months.

Recently emails (to all recipients) stopped arriving, without any changes to the code responsible for sending emails. I am not seeing any errors in the application log. I don't know if/where there is a dedicated email error log I can access.

The number of emails sent is only a handful per day maximum at the moment, not enough to hit any limits.

I wrote a small test case (below). It runs without issues but the emails never arrive.

        $message = "Testing";
        
        try {
            $email = new Email('default');
            $email->from($fromAddress)
            ->to($toAddress)
            ->subject('Testing')
            ->send($message);
        } catch (\Exception $e) {
            error_log('Failed to send email: '.print_r($e, true));
        }

jota 2020-03-02 09:12:12 UTC #3

Hi @balthazaurus,

Thanks for using Bitnami. Please note that this is a developer question and it's highly related to the code you have. I suggest you ask in a developers forum to get more info about the functions you are using. I also suggest you check the information of your SMTP provider to know if it's blocking the requests.

Do not hesitate to open a new thread if you have any other questions about the Bitnami solutions and their configuration.

Thanks

balthazaurus 2020-03-02 18:20:09 UTC #4

Hi @jota,

To clarify, my question is not about the code I am using, but instead about how to do diagnostics on this issue. For example I am not clear on what relevant logs are available.

I am not using an external SMTP provider but instead using the php mail function, since we're talking a very small amount of emails here.

In other words my question is why php mail would suddenly stop working, and how I can problem solve the issue.

Thank you

jota 2020-03-03 08:37:40 UTC #5

Hi @balthazaurus,

You have the Apache and PHP-FPM logs at these paths

/opt/bitnami/apache2/logs/error_log
/opt/bitnami/php/var/log/php-fpm.log

You can take a look at those files in case you find something there. You can also try to run the PHP code you have with the PHP CLI to try to obtain more information.

I hope this helps

balthazaurus 2020-03-03 23:11:26 UTC #6

Thanks @jota - I checked those logs just in case but the application isn't producing any errors. So what I'm really after is a dedicated email error log to see if that is where things are breaking.

Thanks!

balthazaurus 2020-03-05 17:45:23 UTC #7

Does anyone know where the mail log is located on a Lightsail instance? I can't find anything over SSH or any mention in the documentation.

(Also it's insane that Amazon won't give even basic tech support unless you pay $29 per month. That alone is way more than the price of other basic hosting services that already include full support.)

jota 2020-03-06 08:36:06 UTC #8

Hi @balthazaurus,

As I mentioned before, you have a PHP code that is in charge of sending the emails. Depending on the code you use, you will be using different libraries or programs and the logs files they created are different. That's why I suggested you to post your question in a developers forum or check the PHP's documentation to know how to debug the error.

balthazaurus 2020-03-06 18:41:04 UTC #9

Hi @jota! I totally understand where you're coming from but the thing is I am basically just using php mail. I'm not going via any external SMTP. This is why I was hoping there would be a straight forward way of checking for errors.

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