I’m never satisfied when I conclude something doesn’t work because it’s complex. The best thing to do is to snap into diagnostic mode. The first rule of diagnosis of the problem is start simple and work from there. The saying of getting to the root of the problem is accurate.

I looked at the CMS code and concluded that the function being called to send mail is the PHP function of mail(). So I needed to check the PHP mail function by itself, without the complexity of the CMS. If the mail() function sends mail, then the problem is the CMS or my email. If the mail() function does not send mail, then my provider has something that they can work with and I can present the problem to them. Simple I created a simple PHP script called testmail.php with this short little string of code:

<?php
$to = 'youraccount@youremail.com';
$subject = 'Sent on '.date("F j, Y, g:i a");
$message = 'Test message';

mail($to, $subject, $message);
?>

This routine will send mail to the $to variable and also tag the date in the subject. This is all done via the sendmail variable in php, you can do a phpinfo() to find which program sends mail. This can be handy if you need to see when it left the other system and came into yours. Just look the original header and you will be able to see all details.

In the end my problem resulted in my SPAM filter catching the email thus never showing up in the Inbox. Stupid problem, but until you verify the flow of mail with your hosting provider and scale your complexity back… You won’t solve the problem.

The PHP microtime() function returns the UNIX timestamp with micro-seconds.

<?php echo (microtime()) ?>;   //returns 0.123123 1231231231

The first number is the microseconds from the change of the second number, which is the time in seconds from the UNIX epoch of 0:00:00 Jan 1st 1970. So we can explode the line returned into an array using the explode command, then mathematically add them together. i.e. 1231231231.123123. The last line will take the end time and subtract the start time. The result will be displayed in the HTML comments towards the end of the page, where this code is executed.

Put this at the beginning of your page inside of the php tags.

$start=microtime();
$start=explode(" ",$start);
$start=$start[1]+$start[0];

// do something here

Put this at the end of you page inside of the php tags.

$end=microtime();
$end=explode(" ",$end);
$end=$end[1]+$end[0];

printf("\n<!-- Page was generated by PHP %s in %f seconds -->\n",phpversion(),$end-$start);