WordDope

Fixing Issues Between Subscribe2, WordPress, and GoDaddy

// March 9th, 2011 // Plugins

A past client approached me with an issue I was previously unfamiliar with: her GoDaddy hosted WordPress blog and Subscribe2 plugin stopped working together. For nearly two years everything had been working fine until it just stopped. She would create a new post in WordPress but Subscribe2 wouldn’t send out the corresponding email update to her subscribers. What was wrong?

The Subscribe2 Plugin and WordPress

The Subscribe2 plugin is an effective tool to collect, manage, and contact a list of email subscribers. Its setup and management is fairly easy and straightforward. Once installed, you add a widget to the sidebar where readers can add their emails and subscribe to your blog. Within the admin section you can manage your entire subscriber list and the different options the plugin makes available. This is where I had to go to solve the problem of the emails not being sent.

Making Subscribe2, WordPress and GoDaddy Work Together

Initially, I was stumped as to why Subscribe2 and WordPress would suddenly stop working. Searching for a solution on the WordPress support forums led me to believe it was most likely a problem with the site’s host, so I put a call into GoDaddy support.

While he couldn’t figure out why Subscribe2 would stop working with GoDaddy, he suggested changing the email associated with the plugin from my client’s Gmail account (ex: client@gmail.com) to one hosted by the site’s server (ex: client@WordPressBlog.com). This would prevent the emails from having to go through a separate server and being mistaken for spam and getting blocked.

I then went into the Subscribe2 settings within the WordPress admin. I changed the amount of emails that got sent out at once from 0 (unlimited) to a set number (30). Along the same line of thinking as the previous fix, this is to prevent the GoDaddy server from blocking the emails being sent out because it believes them to be spam or exceeds the server’s limit. Here are some FAQs on GoDaddy’s email settings.

After these two quick fixes, my client then added a new post and – TA-DA! – the emails went out.

Does anyone else have any tips to working with Subscribe2, WordPress, and GoDaddy?