Thank you to all who dropped test comments on the last angelahighland.com post. That was very helpful and I really appreciate it!
Basically I was trying to solve two related problems. One was that I was not getting any WordPress mail when a comment showed up from an address I had not moderated before. The other was that when I DID moderate a comment, I still wasn’t getting any mail.
Issue #1 appears to have been caused by a thing we do on our mail server called greylisting. This is a spam prevention technique, and it essentially means that when it gets mail, our server give its the Dubious Face and says to it, “If you’re a legitimate address, come back in 15 minutes and I’ll let you through.” Most mail coming from legitimate sources will in fact pass this test. Most spam mail will not.
However, our greylisting system had not been set up to whitelist mail coming from other servers on the LAN. And since our mail and our web servers are two different machines, mail was telling all the comment mail generated by WordPress to bugger off. Dara checked the settings, saw that 1) we needed to add the addresses of all our servers and 2) the address that was in there was old anyway, and updated accordingly!
Issue #2 was actually WordPress’ fault. They took out the functionality that sent mail after you moderated a comment in a much earlier revision of the code than the one I’m running. Now, you can argue that that’s a decent decision if you think that getting post-moderation mail is redundant–after all, you already got a mail asking you to moderate the comment, right? So why would you need to see the second one?
However, I LIKE getting that second mail. And apparently others did as well, enough that there’s a plugin to put that functionality back in. I installed it.
And now I’m getting all the comment mail I need, as near as I can tell. If you happen to see this post or the previous one, go ahead and drop a comment anyway–I do want to verify that the fixes we’ve done work past just an initial 24-hour period. And, of course, comments are always welcome in general on any of my posts!
(Do note that if you read me primarily on LJ or Dreamwidth, for testing purposes, I don’t actually need comments dropped on either of those systems–the issues I was testing were WordPress-specific. LJ and Dreamwidth’s commenting systems are generally reliable. Generally. 😉 )
Again, thanks to all for your help!
