SOLVED Invite friend feature does not send a email

Hi

I am getting an error message when I try to use the invite a friend feature.

Everything works fine until it comes time for the email to send.

You can fill in the form no problem, you even get the thank you message when you are done. But then the email message is not sent, and if you go on to register an error message appears appears on the registration page that says :

"Ne peut instancier la fonction mail" which translates to "could not instantiate (initialize) mail function"

I am using the French translations on this site so I am wondering if this is somehow causing an issue. I have an English version of this site that works fine. In the French text for the email message for the invite a friend, I did not change the text in square brackets like [EVENT_NAME] etc. so that should not be the problem I don't think. Any ideas?

It just does seem to be able to launch the email from the back end.

Thanks,
Kristen

@Kristen : The message means your mail server doesn't work for some reason. Please send me administrator and FTP account (via support ticket) so that I can check and fix it for you .

Regards,

Tuan

Hi Tuan,

Did you receive my info in the support ticket for this issue (sent 4 days ago)? Have you had any luck fixing this?

Anyone else have this issue? I need to fix it fast.

Thanks,
Kristen

Thought I would share my fix, in case someone else is having the same problem. Take note if you are using special characters (like French) in your event titles and are having problems.

My automatic emails were not sending because the Event title contained special characters. In my case it was an à and an û.

By removing these characters from the session title, the Invite a friend email and the New Registrant notification email now work. The symbols can be used in the body of the text but don't use them in the session titles.

This took a long time to figure out, so I thought I would share. It's not an actual fix as you can still not use special characters in the titles which is a problem if your site is in a language other then English, but at least this is a work around!

Cheers,
K

Thanks Kristen for sharing the fix. That's really strange (the send mail function is a core Joomla function and it should work with all characters, don't know why it doesn't work) .

In this case, please use that temp solution. I will try to do some more research to see whether we can make it works without having to remove these characters (need some time) .

Regards,

Tuan