Problems with multiple customer emails being sent

[PA.com]

Hello,

I have recently (last two months) been having problems at my website with emails, and I would welcome any views as to whether it sounds like a problem with my website or with my web-hosters.

The main problem is with many duplicate confirmation emails being sent once customers complete an order. For instance I completed an order two nights ago and have been plaged with 12 confirmation emails since (the ones generated in Actinic).

In addition to this, I am getting loads of emails from the 'postmaster' of my webhoster saying messages cannot be delivered as it cannot connect with the mail server, despite the fact that I know it has successfully sent emails to the addresses it says cannot be connected to.

To the best of my knowledge, I haven't done anything to aggrevate this problem, the site was running fine, then in July the duplicate emails started occurring, it settled down for three weeks in August and is now back with a vengeance.

I fear I might have to do a full refresh on the site, with only an outside hope that this will cure the problem, the issue here is that this normally takes 2 or 3 days as my site is so big and I encounter lots of timeouts when doing this. If anyone can identify or suggest a likely cause/cure I would be hugely grateful.

Many thanks,
Paul

[Mike Hughes]

It sounds to me like a webserver issue rather than an Actinic problem.

Your errors file might have some clues. look at acatalog/error.err

Mike

[PA.com]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your suggestion. I have tried to view the error log that Actinic generates in the housekeeping section and there is no page to be found - http://www.piano-accompaniments.com/acatalog/error.err.
Would this in itself point to a problem, or might it be empty simply because there have been no errors generated?

Also, if it is a webserver issue, is there any thing I should alert them to that might be the cause of the problem? My correspondance from them about this issue is pretty vague, they mentioned trying to refresh but I would like this to be the last resort if possible.

Many thanks for taking the trouble to reply
Paul

[Mike Hughes]

I've never really understood why some people don't have an error.err file. Maybe it's an option that needs setting.

It's certainly a good thing to have as it logs problems. Particulalry problems connected with smtp servers which this one is.

I doubt if the problem is connected to not having an error.err file. It just makes it harder to work out what the problem is.

Without any details it's hard to say what the problem might be. The only other thing I can think of to try is to run a network test and see what get's reported back.

Mike

[PA.com]

I'll see if I can ask my webhosters to provide an error page for me, as that sounds like a useful thing to have. The network test came out fine, with all factors being passed, and an email being sent back to me. I only get one of these emails interestingly though, unlike the 12 order confirmation emails when placing an order.

The problems keep occuring, so I think I'm going to try and refresh the site to see whether this works. I have a question regarding refreshing the site (which I've only ever done once). Do I need to suspend ordering for the full time in which the refresh is taking place, or will my site still effectively be functional while the refresh takes place? I sell digital download products, so do these all get stripped out before being replaced?

Thanks,
Paul

[malbro]

I'll see if I can ask my webhosters to provide an error page for me, as that sounds like a useful thing to have. The network test came out fine, with all factors being passed, and an email being sent back to me. I only get one of these emails interestingly though, unlike the 12 order confirmation emails when placing an order.

The problems keep occuring, so I think I'm going to try and refresh the site to see whether this works. I have a question regarding refreshing the site (which I've only ever done once). Do I need to suspend ordering for the full time in which the refresh is taking place, or will my site still effectively be functional while the refresh takes place? I sell digital download products, so do these all get stripped out before being replaced?

Thanks,
Paul

The file error.err is generated automatically by the Actinic scripts and holds error messages from the scripts.