Can't get MainWP emails to fire

We have MainWP free set up on subdomain in SiteGround hosting account. Cron was not firing because of no traffic, so dropped wp-cron on the install, and configured wp-cron on the SG server. Cron is firing. Emails DO NOT send (daily digest, update notifications, security notifications). They have before, but only sporadically, which I took to be an issue with the cron not firing because of no traffic to the site. Looking for help to troubleshoot or get emails flowing again.

Emails are not in spam folder. SMTP plugin is set up and test fine.
I have just installed Email Log plugin, but no activity expected there until later today or tomorrow am.

System Info:


### WordPress Check                Required                                               Detected                                     Status   ###

FileSystem Method                  = direct                                               direct                                       Pass        
MultiSite Disabled                 =true                                                  true                                         Pass        
WordPress Memory Limit             >=64M                                                  256M                                         Pass        
WordPress Version                  >=3.6                                                  6.3.1                                        Pass        

### PHP                            Required                                               Detected                                     Status   ###

cURL Extension Enabled             =true                                                  true                                         Pass        
cURL Timeout                       >=300 seconds                                          40                                           Warning     
cURL Version                       >=7.18.1                                               7.85.0                                       Pass        
OpenSSL Version                    >=OpenSSL/1.1.0                                        OpenSSL/3.0.9                                Pass        
OpenSSL Working Status             Yes                                                    Yes                                          Pass        
PCRE Backtracking Limit            >=10000                                                1000000                                      Pass        
PHP Allow URL fopen                N/A                                                    YES                                                      
PHP Disabled Functions             N/A                                                    No functions disabled.                                   
PHP Exif Support                   N/A                                                    YES                                                      
PHP IPTC Support                   N/A                                                    YES                                                      
PHP Loaded Extensions              N/A                                                    Core, PDO, Phar, Reflection, SPL, SimpleXML, Zend OPcache, bcmath, bz2, calendar, cgi-fcgi, ctype, curl, date, dba, dom, enchant, exif, fileinfo, filter, ftp, gd, gettext, gmp, hash, iconv, imap, intl, json, libxml, mbstring, memcached, mysqli, mysqlnd, openssl, pcntl, pcre, pdo_mysql, pdo_pgsql, pdo_sqlite, pgsql, posix, pspell, readline, session, shmop, soap, sockets, sodium, sqlite3, standard, sysvmsg, sysvsem, tidy, tokenizer, xml, xmlreader, xmlrpc, xmlwriter, xsl, zip, zlib            
PHP Max Execution Time             >=30 seconds                                           120                                          Pass        
PHP Max Input Time                 >=30 seconds                                           120                                          Pass        
PHP Memory Limit                   >=128M                                                 768M                                         Pass        
PHP Post Max Size                  >=2M                                                   256M                                         Pass        
PHP Safe Mode Disabled             =true                                                  true                                         Pass        
PHP Upload Max Filesize            >=2M                                                   256M                                         Pass        
PHP Version                        >=7.4                                                  7.4.33                                       Pass        
PHP XML Support                    N/A                                                    YES                                                      
SSL Extension Enabled              =true                                                  true                                         Pass        
SSL Warnings                       = empty                                                                                             Pass        

### MySQL                          Required                                               Detected                                     Status   ###

MySQL Client Encoding              N/A                                                    utf8                                                     
MySQL Mode                         N/A                                                    NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION                                   
MySQL Version                      >=5.0                                                  5.7.39-42-log                                Pass        

### Server Configuration           Detected Value                                      ###

Accept Content                     text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Charset Content             N/A                                                    
Architecture                       64		 bit                                               
Gateway Interface                  CGI/1.1                                                
HTTPS                              ON                                                     
Memory Usage                       46.49 MB                                               
Operating System                   Linux                                                  
Request Time                       1694626018                                             
Server Protocol                    HTTP/1.0                                               
Server self connect                Response Test O.K.                                     
Server Software                    Apache                                                 
User Agent                         Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/113.0

### MainWP Dashboard Settings      Detected Value                                      ###

Abandoned plugins/themes tolerance 365                                                    
Basic uptime monitoring enabled    Yes                                                    
MainWP Dashboard Version           Latest: 4.5.1.1 | Detected: 4.5.1.1 Pass               
MainWP legacy backups enabled      No                                                     
Maximum number of pages to return                                                         
Maximum number of posts to return                                                         
Maximum simultaneous install and update requests3                                                      
Maximum simultaneous requests      4                                                      
Maximum simultaneous requests per ip1                                                      
Maximum simultaneous sync requests 8                                                      
Minimum delay between requests     200                                                    
Minimum delay between requests to the same ip1000                                                   
Number of child sites              4                                                      
Optimize for shared hosting or big networksNo                                                     
Plugin advanced automatic updates enabledYes                                                    
Primary backup system              MainWP Legacy Backups                                  
REST API enabled                   No                                                     
Site health monitoring enabled     Yes                                                    
Theme advanced automatic updates enabledYes                                                    
Use WP Cron                        Yes                                                    
WP Core advanced automatic updates enabledYes                                                    

### Extensions                     Version                                                License                                      Status   ###

No installed extensions            

### Plugin                         Version                                                Status                                    ###

Email Log                          2.4.8                                                  Active                                       
MainWP Dashboard                   4.5.1.1                                                Active                                       
SiteGround Optimizer               7.4.1                                                  Active                                       
UpdraftPlus - Backup/Restore       1.23.10                                                Active                                       
WP Cerber Security, Anti-spam & Malware Scan9.5.7                                                  Inactive                                     
WP Mail SMTP                       3.9.0                                                  Active                                       

Hi @rfraser

Welcome to the MainWP community.

If you wish to use server-side Cron, you need to disable WP-Cron in the MainWP settings.
The toggle for it can be found on the Dashboard → Settings → Advanced Settings page.

You can find more information about Disabling WP cron in this KB: Disable WP Cron - MainWP Documentation

Let us know if that helps with the email deliverability.

Hi Bojan-
Thanks for responding so quickly. I tried with wp-cron disabled in the MainWP settings, and with wp-cron disabled in wp-config.php. With these settings it appeared that cron did not ever fire. Cron appears to be firing now.

Current cron settings:
in wp-config.com: OFF
in MainWP Advanced Settings: ON
in SiteGround server cron jobs: wp-cron running from here

Still no emails.

Here is cron report email from this morning:

Executed the cron event ‘action_scheduler_run_queue’ in 0.007s.
Executed the cron event ‘mainwp_cronstats_action’ in 0.006s.
Executed the cron event ‘mainwp_cronpingchilds_action’ in 0.002s.
Executed the cron event ‘mainwp_cronupdatescheck_action’ in 0.004s.
Executed the cron event ‘mainwp_croncheckstatus_action’ in 0.006s.
Executed the cron event ‘mainwp_cronsitehealthcheck_action’ in 0.004s.
Executed the cron event ‘wp_delete_temp_updater_backups’ in 0.002s.
Success: Executed a total of 7 cron events.


Thanks for the update.

Would you mind opening a private Help Desk ticket so we can collect some additional information & investigate further?

And please refer to this Managers thread by its URL in the ticket.

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

Just to provide an update on this -

@rfraser removed in the host settings all the rules that do not call the WP Cron function. Then he turned WP-Cron back on in the plugin settings and removed the rule from wp-config.php file.

The emails are now being sent out every other day and we suspect that some 3rd party code is affecting WP Cron and producing these results.

@rfraser is satisfied with this email frequency and so the issue is marked as solved.