Email notifications not working

[johnm (John McCurdy)]

Recently I have not been receiving the daily notifications of available updates. I’m using the Offload SES Lite plugin (have been for quite some time), and I’m receiving notifications from WordPress and from the Wordfence plugin just fine, but nothing from the MainWP dashboard. I’ve checked all the settings I can find and my notification email address is correct, but still no messages. I did run across a couple possible issues in the dashboard:

1. In Status=>Server=>Chron Schedules the cron job “Check for available updates” has a last run of “Never.” The other two jobs have the expected dates and times of earlier today. (FYI, I have wp-chron enabled, and Uptime Robot checking a WordPress page every ten minutes.)

2. The Status=>Server=>Error Log is full of entries like this: “PHP Deprecated: Array and string offset access syntax with curly braces is deprecated in /[site-path]/wp-content/plugins/mainwp/class/class-mainwp-utility.php on line 2126” FOLLOWED by the same entry for line 2163.

My PHP version is 7.4.2.

Any ideas?

[bogdan (Bogdan Rapaić)]

Can you please post the community system report from your MainWP Dashboard for review? The report is located in your Dashboard under Status → Server, on the top right of the page.

Be sure to use the button like the one below; this button hides all your private information:

Pressing the button auto-copies the report to your clipboard then just paste it in a reply here.

[johnm (John McCurdy)]

Server Info Required Detected Status

MainWP Dashboard
MainWP Dashboard Version 4.0.7.2 4.0.7.2 Pass
MainWP Upload Directory Writable Writable Pass
MainWP Extensions
MainWP Branding Extension 4.0 Active Pass
MainWP Bulk Settings Manager Extension4.0.2 Active Pass
MainWP Clean and Lock Extension 4.0.1 Active Pass
MainWP Wordfence Extension 4.0.1 Active Pass
WordPress
WordPress Version >=3.6 5.3.2 Pass
WordPress Memory Limit >=64M 256M Pass
MultiSite Disabled =true true Pass
FileSystem Method = direct direct Pass
PHP
PHP Version >=5.6 7.4.4 Pass
PHP Safe Mode Disabled =true true Pass
PHP Max Execution Time >=30 seconds 300 Pass
PHP Max Input Time >=30 seconds 300 Pass
PHP Memory Limit >=128M 256M Pass
PCRE Backtracking Limit >=10000 1000000 Pass
PHP Upload Max Filesize >=2M 128M Pass
PHP Post Max Size >=2M 128M Pass
SSL Extension Enabled =true true Pass
SSL Warnings = empty Pass
cURL Extension Enabled =true true Pass
cURL Timeout >=300 seconds 300 Pass
cURL Version >=7.18.1 7.58.0 Pass
cURL SSL Version >=OpenSSL/0.9.8l OpenSSL/1.1.1d Pass
PHP Allow URL fopen YES
PHP Exif Support YES ( V7.4.)
PHP IPTC Support YES
PHP XML Support YES
PHP Disabled Functions disk_free_space, disk_total_space, diskfreespace, dl, exec, opcache_get_configuration, opcache_get_status, passthru, pclose, pcntl_alarm, pcntl_exec, pcntl_fork, pcntl_get_last_error, pcntl_getpriority, pcntl_setpriority, pcntl_signal, pcntl_signal_dispatch, pcntl_sigprocmask, pcntl_sigtimedwait, pcntl_sigwaitinfo, pcntl_strerror, pcntl_waitpidpcntl_wait, pcntl_wexitstatus, pcntl_wifcontinued, pcntl_wifexited, pcntl_wifsignaled, pcntl_wifstopped, pcntl_wstopsig, pcntl_wtermsig, popen, posix_getpwuid, posix_kill, posix_mkfifo, posix_setpgid, posix_setsid, posix_setuid, posix_uname, proc_close, proc_get_status, proc_nice, proc_open, proc_terminate, shell_exec, show_source, system,
PHP Loaded Extensions Core, FFI, PDO, Phar, Reflection, SPL, SimpleXML, Zend OPcache, bcmath, calendar, cgi-fcgi, ctype, curl, date, dom, exif, fileinfo, filter, ftp, gd, gettext, hash, iconv, igbinary, imagick, json, libxml, mbstring, mysqli, mysqlnd, openssl, pcre, pdo_mysql, posix, readline, redis, session, shmop, soap, sockets, sodium, standard, sysvmsg, sysvsem, sysvshm, tokenizer, xml, xmlreader, xmlrpc, xmlwriter, xsl, zip, zlib
MySQL
MySQL Version >=5.0 10.4.12-MariaDB-1:10.4.12+maria~bionic Pass
MySQL Mode ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION
MySQL Client Encoding utf8mb4
Server Info
WordPress Root Directory /sites/jm44.net/files/
Server Name jm44.net
Server Software nginx/1.16.1
Operating System Linux
Architecture 64 bit
Server IP 104.248.126.127
Server Protocol HTTP/2.0
HTTP Host jm44.net
HTTPS ON - on
Server self connect Not expected HTTP response body:
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.149 Safari/537.36
Server Port 443
Gateway Interface CGI/1.1
Memory Usage 7.3 MB
Complete URL Log In ‹ JM44 — WordPress
Request Time 1584989405
Accept Content text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,image/apng,/;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9
Accept-Charset Content N/A
Currently Executing Script Pathname/sites/jm44.net/files/wp-admin/admin.php
Current Page URI /wp-admin/admin.php?page=ServerInformation
Remote Address 95.176.168.42
Remote Host N/A
Remote Port 58167
MainWP Settings
Number Of Child Sites 11
Use WP-Cron Yes
Optimize for Shared Hosting or Big NetworksNo
Automatic Daily Update Install trusted updates
Abandoned Plugins/Themes Tolerance 365
Maximum number of posts to return
Maximum number of pages to return
Primary Backup System Default MainWP Backups
Maximum simultaneous requests 4
Minimum delay between requests 200
Maximum simultaneous requests per ip1
Minimum delay between requests to the same ip1000
Maximum simultaneous sync requests
Minimum simultaneous install/update requests
Active Plugins
MainWP Child 4.0.7 Active
MainWP Dashboard 4.0.7.2 Active
SpinupWP 1.1.2 Active
Wordfence Security 7.4.6 Active
WP Offload SES Lite 1.4 Active

[bogdan (Bogdan Rapaić)]

Thanks @johnm for sharing that info. I reviewed it by I can’t see anything wrong in there.

However, it might be good to test with PHP 7.3 version just so we can be sure. Are you able to temporary roll it back to 7.3 and see if that helps?

[johnm (John McCurdy)]

Okay, I’ve rolled back to PHP 7.3. I’ll have to let you know about the email issue, as updates don’t seem to be coming out so fast at the moment…

However, I’m still seeing the same error messages in the log:
[25-Mar-2020 15:23:02 UTC] PHP Deprecated: Array and string offset access syntax with curly braces is deprecated in /sites/jm44.net/files/wp-content/plugins/mainwp/class/class-mainwp-utility.php on line 2126
[25-Mar-2020 15:23:02 UTC] PHP Deprecated: Array and string offset access syntax with curly braces is deprecated in /sites/jm44.net/files/wp-content/plugins/mainwp/class/class-mainwp-utility.php on line 2163

In looking closer I see that the same two entries are being added to the WordPress debug log every single minute at two seconds after the minute, and in looking back through the log files I see that they have been, every single minute, since I installed the dashboard plugin a couple weeks ago.

When I discovered that, I looked at the server’s access and error logs, but nothing there seems to have any relation to these events in the debug log. The error log only has a couple (or fewer) entries per day, mostly missing favicon.ico errors, and an occasional hacker or bot trying to access a system file that Wordfence blocks. There’s not much in the access log either, other than records of my own accessing the site and of the Uptime Robot ping every ten minutes.

So, we’ll have to wait to know if changing the PHP version has any effect on the email problem, unless you know of a way to force an email from the dashboard. (As I said before, all other email from the site is working fine.)

But why am I seeing these log entries for a MainWP file, and why every single minute?

Thanks for your help!

[johnm (John McCurdy)]

I just received an update notification from my dashboard, so apparently rolling back to PHP 7.3 solved that problem. Hopefully it will be compatible with 7.4 soon?

And, the debug log is still getting hit with those same two entries every single minute…

[bogdan (Bogdan Rapaić)]

Hi @johnm, thank you for your update.

We will look into this for the next update.