Managing the customer accounts and provisioning orders via hosting platforms such as WHMCS, is a key task that we perform in our role as Outsourced hosting support specialists for web hosts.

WHMCS sends notifications to users and admins in the server, in many scenarios such as new order intimation, account creation, support tickets, invoices, etc.

See how we help web hosting companies

But there can be scenarios where these mails fail to deliver, and give error message while attempting emails. On the system activity log, you can see an error message like ‘Admin Email Notification Sending Failed’.

Here, we’ll see the different reasons and error messages related to ‘Admin Email Notification Sending Failed’ and how to fix it.

What causes the error ‘Admin Email Notification Sending Failed’ in WHMCS

The failure to send mails from WHMCS with the message ‘Admin Email Notification Sending Failed’ can manifest itself in different forms, which we’ll see one by one.

1. ‘Admin Email Notification Sending Failed – You must provide at least one recipient email address.’ – This message shows that the recipient admin email address is not configured in WHMCS.
2. ‘Admin Email Notification Sending Failed – You must provide at least one mailer is not supported.’ – The mail type chosen for the WHMCS can be PHPMailer or SMTP, which can affect email delivery functions, if not working fine.
3. ‘Admin Email Notification Sending Failed – SMTP Error: Data not accepted. SMTP server error.’ – This variant of error message usually shows when the SMTP server is not working fine.
4. ‘Admin Email Notification Sending Failed – The following From address failed: test@example.com : Called Mail() without being connected’ – If the ‘From’ address configured to send mails from WHMCS is not a valid account, it will throw this error.
5. ‘Admin Email Notification Sending Failed – Language string failed to load: tls’ – This error is usually seen related to the SPF record settings or other configuration issues while using external mail server such as google.
6. ‘Admin Email Notification Sending Failed – SMTP Error: The following recipients failed: mail@domain.com SMTP server error: 5.7.1 : Sender address rejected: not owned by user mail@domain.com’ – In case of invalid sender addresses or blocks, this error can show up.
7. ‘Admin Email Notification Sending Failed – The following From address failed: test@mail.com : Called Mail() without being connected’ – When trying to attempt mail without properly establishing connection to SMTP server, this error occurs.
8. ‘Admin Email Notification Sending Failed – PHPMailer Exception – SMTP Error: The following recipients failed’ – This error message occurs while using PHPMailer to send mails to invalid recipient addresses or if the mail function fails.
9. ‘Admin Email Notification Sending Failed – PHPMailer Exception – Could not instantiate mail function’ – Yet again, when the PHP mail function fails due to any reason, this error shows up.

[ Take care of your customers, before your competitors do. Get world-class support specialists to delight your customers. ]

How to fix WHMCS error “Admin Email Notification Sending Failed”

Depending on the cause of the error, the fix for the error “Admin Email Notification Sending Failed” also varies. From the error logs, we pin-point the actual reason for the error and fix it in no time.

Here are some key aspects we check to prevent email errors in WHMCS:

1. At least one ‘Administrator’ must be setup to receive notification emails. We confirm this by enabling ‘Support Tickets Notifications’ in ‘Setup > Administrators > Edit’ option in WHMCS.
2. We ensure that the mail server is authorised to send email from the option in WHMCS ‘System Emails From Email’ address under ‘Setup > General Settings > Mail’ and the email address configured is a valid sender in the mail server.
3. While using PHPMailer as the Mail type, the option to enable ‘nobody to send mails from the server’ should be checked, inorder for the php mail() function to work.
4. WHMCS supports any of the two ‘Mail Types’ – PHP mail and SMTP mail. In servers where PHP mail() function is disabled due to security issues, we configure the SMTP server as the ‘Mail Type’ in WHMCS.
5. In case of SMTP server as mailer, we check and confirm that the settings – Port, Username, Server, SSL, Password – are correct and the server is functional with the given credentials.
6. We also check the DNS and SPF record of the domain and see if it works fine with the mail server configured, especially in the case of Google Apps.

While these are some basic checks to be done for WHMCS emails to work, an in-depth debugging may be required in more complicated scenarios, based on the error received.

[ Focus on your core business without interruptions. Our tech support experts are here to manage your customers 24/7. ]

At Bobcares, our 24/7 server specialists constantly monitor all the services in the server and proactively audit the server for any errors or corruption in them.

This enables us to prevent a service downtime for our customers who are web hosts. By following a systematic debugging approach for service or other errors, we have been able to minimize the customer complaints involved.

If you would like to know how to avoid downtime for your customers due to service failures, we would be happy to talk to you.