[FIXED] BuddyPress Activation Email Not Sending?

Are your BuddyPress email notifications not sending?

A lot of BuddyPress users run into this issue. Sometimes, you’ll find that the password reset email is delivered, but the activation email isn’t.

We’ll show you the easy way to fix your BuddyPress notifications with SMTP. At the end of the article, we’ll also show you how to log and resend these emails.

Fix Your BuddyPress Emails Now

What Is the BuddyPress Activation Email?

The BuddyPress activation email is the email that’s sent when a new user first registers on your site. It contains a link that your new user needs to click to activate their account.

If this email isn’t delivered, your new users can’t complete the BuddyPress email verification process. That means they can’t log in and use their new account.

We’re going to show you how to send all BuddyPress emails through SMTP or a 3rd party email provider.

How to Fix BuddyPress Email Notifications

1. Install WP Mail SMTP

WP Mail SMTP is the best SMTP plugin for WordPress. It lets you send WordPress emails through a 3rd party email provider.

Using an email provider adds vital authentication headers to your emails. That’s extremely important because emails without these headers are often filed in the Junk Mail folder.

The basic steps in this tutorial will work with the free or Pro version of WP Mail SMTP. We recommend that you use the Pro license because it gives you some extra features, including:

• BuddyPress email logging
• Resend BuddyPress emails individually or in bulk
• Open and click tracking for WordPress emails

We’ll show you how these features work later in the tutorial.

If you’re using the Pro version or above, you can download the latest copy of the plugin from the Downloads tab in your WP Mail SMTP account.

Go ahead and upload the plugin zip file to your WordPress site.

As soon as you activate the plugin, the Setup Wizard will open in your browser. Let’s work through the Setup Wizard next.

2. Choose an Email Provider

In this step, we’re going to decide which email provider you want to use to send WordPress emails.

WP Mail SMTP supports free and paid mailers for any size of BuddyPress community.

Since you’ll want BuddyPress activation emails to arrive quickly, we strongly recommend that you choose a transactional email provider.

Transactional email providers are designed to handle high-volume sending, and they’re very good at delivering emails almost instantly. SendLayer, SMTP.com, and Sendinblue are all great options.

If you’re just testing things out, SendLayer lets you send your first 500 emails for free.

Other providers like Gmail or Other SMTP will likely work on a small site, but they aren’t designed to handle very high volume sending. So with Gmail SMTP, you’re more likely to run into issues as your community grows.

When you’ve chosen your WordPress email provider, click the link below to open up the corresponding doc. Following the steps in our doc will help you complete the signup process and get connected.

Mailers available in all versions	Mailers in WP Mail SMTP Pro
SendLayer	Amazon SES
SMTP.com	Microsoft 365 / Outlook.com
Sendinblue	Zoho Mail
Google Workspace / Gmail
Mailgun
Postmark
SendGrid
SparkPost
Other SMTP

3. Enable Email Logging

At the end of the WP Mail SMTP Setup Wizard, you’ll have the option to turn on 2 features:

• The Detailed Email Logs setting will keep track of the subject, sender, recipient, and other header information.
• Weekly Email Summaries will create a weekly report about the emails that have been sent.

We recommend that you turn both of these on.

After enabling email logging, click Save and Continue to complete the setup. WP Mail SMTP will send an automatic test email so you know everything’s working.

Now your emails are set up, we want to recommend a few other features that are helpful to BuddyPress admins.

Let’s head to WP Mail SMTP » Settings.

And now click the Email Log tab at the top.

We recommend that you select Log Email Contents here. This will log the entire email body in addition to the headers. That can be helpful if you want to resend BuddyPress activation emails that fail.

If you want, you can also enable the other settings here, including:

• Save attachments
• Open email tracking
• Click link tracking

And if you want, you can also reduce the Log Retention Period to make sure that BuddyPress email logs don’t eat up too much disk space.

Now you’ve completed the WP Mail SMTP BuddyPress setup, there’s 1 more thing to do before we test it out.

We need to add a short code snippet to redirect your BuddyPress emails through your new email provider.

4. Add Code Snippet to Fix BuddyPress Emails

By default, WordPress sends password reset emails using the wp_mail() function. BuddyPress activation emails aren’t sent through wp_mail() by default, so that’s why so many people have issues with them.

So in this step, we’ll add a code snippet that’ll re-route all BuddyPress emails through WP Mail SMTP.

This code snippet will also make sure that all emails are sent as HTML emails, rather than in plaintext format. That lets you track opens and clicks.

First, you need to install and activate the Code Snippets plugin. This will let you easily add the code to send BuddyPress emails through wp_mail() without actually editing your site’s files directly.

Next, go to Snippets » Add New in your WordPress dashboard. Enter a name in the field provided so you can identify this snippet, then paste in the code below.

Here’s the code you’ll want to paste in to enable SMTP in BuddyPress:

// Set BP to use wp_mail
add_filter( 'bp_email_use_wp_mail', '__return_true' );
// Set messages to HTML for BP sent emails.
add_filter( 'wp_mail_content_type', function( $default ) {
	if ( did_action( 'bp_send_email' ) ) {
		return 'text/html';
	}
	return $default;
} );
// Use HTML template
add_filter(
	'bp_email_get_content_plaintext',
	function( $content, $property, $transform, $bp_email ) {
		if ( ! did_action( 'bp_send_email' ) ) {
			return $content;
		}
		return $bp_email->get_template( 'add-content' );
	},
	10,
	4
);

Make sure to click the Save Changes button. You should then see a success message reading “Snippet added.”

Now all your BuddyPress emails are being sent through WP Mail SMTP in HTML format.

Let’s try it out!

5. Test BuddyPress Activation Email

Now we have WP Mail SMTP up and running, all BuddyPress emails are being sent through your email provider. This will fix the issues you were having with email deliverability.

To test it out, we can register a brand new user on your BuddyPress site to trigger the activation email. Be sure to use a real email address for this test because we want to be sure that the email is delivered.

Go ahead and register a test user now.

When you submit the form, you’ll get the activation email in your inbox.

If the BuddyPress verification email goes to spam, it’s possible that you have a missing DNS record.

You can test this by heading to the WP Mail SMTP Email Test page.

When you send a test email, WP Mail SMTP will detect any issues with your DNS records and let you know what’s missing.

For example, here’s what you’ll see if you don’t haven’t created a DMARC record.

If everything’s working, we can move on and look at some of those extra email logging features we talked about at the start.

6. View BuddyPress Activation Email in the Log

Now you have WordPress email logging enabled, every email sent from BuddyPress will be saved in your email log.

Head to WP Mail SMTP » Email Log to take a look.

We can see the BuddyPress activation email right here at the top of the email log.

And because we enabled open and click tracking, we also know that the recipient received the activation email and clicked on a link.

When you open up the log file, you’ll see some extra information.

At the top, you can see the Status of the email.

All mailers support the Sent and Failed status. If you’re using a transactional mailer like SendLayer, you might see Unconfirmed or Delivered statuses as well.

Next, we’ll show you one final tip: how to resend verification emails from BuddyPress.

7. Resend the BuddyPress Activation Email

Right underneath the basic email log information, there’s also a Resend link.

This allows you to resend BuddyPress activation emails that have failed. If you want, you can forward them to a different email address.

Just hit Yes to resend the BuddyPress activation email that failed.

And that’s it! Now you know how to use BuddyPress SMTP to fix your activation emails.

Fix Your BuddyPress Emails Now

Next, Set Up Push Notifications in WordPress

Do you want to alert BuddyPress users or visitors? You can send alerts automatically based on specific actions, or manually send push notifications when you have something new to announce.

Check out this tutorial on how to add web push notifications to WordPress with a free plugin.

Ready to fix your emails? Get started today with the best WordPress SMTP plugin. WP Mail SMTP Elite includes full White Glove Setup and offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.

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