Gui A. a11n

Happy to help, @theripper! I’m closing this support thread but don’t hesitate to create new topics if you need further assistance. Cheers!

Hi there! 👋

Thanks for reaching out, and I’m sorry to hear about the spam — it’s definitely frustrating to deal with manually.

The good news is that if Google reCAPTCHA v2 Invisible is properly configured and active in your MailPoet settings, it should be doing a solid job of blocking bot signups through your MailPoet forms specifically. The fact that you’re still seeing a steady flow of spam subscribers makes me suspect the spam may actually be entering your site through a different door.

Here’s the thing: MailPoet’s reCAPTCHA setting only protects MailPoet subscription forms. It does not protect other entry points on your site, such as:

• WordPress registration forms (at /wp-login.php?action=register) — if your site allows open registration, bots can create fake WordPress user accounts, and those users automatically sync into your MailPoet subscriber list.
• WooCommerce registration/checkout forms — if you’re running WooCommerce, bots can register accounts through the My Account page or during checkout.
• Comment forms — if you’ve enabled the MailPoet option to add subscribers via comments (under MailPoet → Settings → Basics), unprotected comments can be another spam vector.

To help us narrow this down, could you share your site’s URL? That way we can take a look at what forms are active and also check our sending logs to determine where the spam might be slipping through. If you don’t want to share your site’s domain through this public forum, you’re welcome to reach out to us directly via the MailPoet support form so we can investigate in more detail.

For a deeper dive into protecting all forms on your site, our knowledge base article covers this thoroughly: Add CAPTCHA to your Website’s Forms.

Looking forward to hearing back with your site URL so we can help get this sorted! 🙂

Hi there,

Thanks for sharing those logs — they’re very helpful!

The “Invalid date” display in the System Status is actually a secondary symptom. The real issue is in your error logs:

mss.ERROR: requests-curl.failed with curl_errno: 28 — “Connection timed out after 10001 milliseconds”

This means your server is unable to reach the MailPoet Sending Service at bridge.mailpoet.com — the connection times out before it can even be established. That’s why your sending queue isn’t processing emails.

This is a server-level networking issue, not a MailPoet bug. Here’s what I’d recommend:

Step 1: Try the cURL Options plugin

Install the Wise Builds cURL Options plugin, which lets you increase the timeout limit for cURL connections. Once installed, go to Settings > cURL Options, click “Add Rule” twice, and create two rules: Host Protocol Option Value your website URL https CURLOPT_TIMEOUT 30 bridge.mailpoet.com https CURLOPT_TIMEOUT 30

After saving, check if sending resumes.

Step 2: Contact your hosting provider

If the plugin above doesn’t help, please reach out to your hosting company and ask them to:

• Run curl https://bridge.mailpoet.com from your server’s command line to verify the connection works
• Check if any firewall, security module (e.g., mod_security), or network restriction is blocking outbound HTTPS connections to bridge.mailpoet.com
• Confirm there are no DNS resolution issues for that domain
• Ensure the server’s cURL library and PHP version are up to date

You can share this message with them:

“cURL requests from my website to https://bridge.mailpoet.com are timing out (cURL error 28, connect_time is 0.0, no IP resolved). Could you please check if there’s a firewall rule, security module, or network restriction blocking outbound HTTPS connections to that domain? Could you also verify DNS resolution for bridge.mailpoet.com from the server?”

Step 3: Check for plugin conflicts

If you have any security plugins active (such as WordFence, Sucuri, iThemes Security, or Ninja Firewall), try temporarily deactivating them and testing again. These can sometimes block outgoing connections. You can follow this guide to run a conflict test.

About the “Invalid date” display: Once the connection issue is resolved and your cron tasks start completing successfully, the System Status timestamps should update to valid dates automatically. If they don’t, let us know and we can help with that as a follow-up.

For more details, you can also check out our full troubleshooting guide: Sending Does Not Work (Troubleshooting).

Let us know how it goes!

Hi there,

Thank you for the helpful reply. Just now, I went to submit a feature request using your provided link and clicking “New Issue,” but received the message, “Issues are disabled for the selected repository. Please select a different repository.” Am I doing this correctly? I don’t know my way around GitHub.

That’s odd! Are you clicking the Create Post button after typing the Title and Description as shown here? https://d.pr/i/JAVZVI

Can you try it through a different browser or using a private/incognito browser window?

Also, if it’s not too much to ask, could you provide that CSS snippet that would hide the popup on my portfolio pages, and where I would insert it (I’m assuming a template)?

Can you send us the URL of your portfolio page? We’ll take a look at the theme CSS and see if we can help you with that. 🙂

Thank you!

Hi there,

Thank you for your patience, and I completely understand your frustration — you’re right that the standard list-cleaning advice doesn’t apply here since this is a brand-new setup with no subscriber list to speak of.

After looking into this more closely on our end, we found that your domain insitepeek.net was being flagged by our automated security screening because it’s a relatively new domain and/or because you have an IP address from your ISP that falls into a poor reputation range (which is very common on shared hostint environments).

We’ve gone ahead and whitelisted your domain and restored our sending service to your account. If you still can’t send emails, please ensure to click the “Resume sending” button on the MailPoet > Emails page.

After that, try sending yourself a preview email to confirm everything is working. If your confirmation emails and previews start arriving as expected, you’re all set!

If you run into any other issues, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Hi @cha16,

Thanks so much for coming back to share what happened — that’s really helpful for others who might run into the same issue!

It definitely sounds like something changed on the server side during that certificate renewal on April 3. This is a pattern we’ve seen before: certain hosting configurations can block the simplified User-Agent that Apple Mail uses to load images, and server-side changes (like certificate renewals or security rule updates) can sometimes trigger it.

Glad to hear everything is back to normal, and thanks again for confirming that MailPoet wasn’t the cause. If you ever run into anything else, don’t hesitate to reach out!

Thank you! I’ve just replied to your ticket. If you have any additional questions feel free to reply to it. I’m marking this forum thread as resolved.

Hey @soniksoundlib,

Thanks for sharing a screenshot of the automation flow. I can confirm that this automation requires subscriber’s consent as it has a delay action.

However, you mentioned that the automation fails to run even for confirmed subscribers, which is not expected.

It’s great to hear that switching the task scheduler method to Visitors to your website made it, though. In this case, I suggest keeping this newsletter task scheduler going forward as it seems to be working more reliably on your website.

If you need anything else, let us know. We’ll be happy to help you further!