My first suggestion would be that WP Engine is not allowing you access to your other server and email accounts. WP Engine do put some more extreme security in place which we meet every now and then. Can I suggest that you have a talk to them about the error.

Hey Swordfish,

Thanks for your reply. I did have this discussion with WP Engine before posting this topic. Of course, they pointed me to the plugin developer. When you say “WP Engine do put some more extreme security in place which we meet every now and then” would you care to give me a little more information?  

Specifically, what extreme security measures have you seen that WP Engine puts in place? Would these prevent the Reply by Email Simple-Press plugin from working? If so, why? Is there a resolution that you’ve identified on your end? Or, is this only fixable at the server level?

Thanks in advance for your reply.

Afraid that I can’t name anything off-hand. All I know is that every now and then someones posts here with a problem that is often unique and sometimes a little odd and that we can’t replicate and it often seems to be connected to access and/or remote access. And they have named wp-engine as their host and fixed the problem by changing their hosting security setup in some way.

Afraid I am not a ‘server’ expert and have never myself used wp-engine. I just know it crops up with these oddball issues from time to time. Oh – and like most hosts – they always initially blame the plugins or themes! At least it seems that way. But I also get the idea that people like their hosting package.

The only reason I was suggesting you ask your hosting is simply because if it was working before you changed hosts with the same settings then the only difference would be the host themselves. Some hosts will want the email server to be with them and perhaps will disallow programmatic calls to another email server. The WP-Engine guys should be able to tell you if they are blocking that which would cause the inability to open the IMAP stream. And if it fails there then that would also explain the CRON task not finishing.

Can you do it from the test connection button in the post by email options?

Additional: Of course it might be the other way around. Perhaps your old hosting is blocking the IMAP call from a remote server for some reason?

OK, I thnk I’m just going to forget about it unless one of our members asks about it.  For now,` I’ll just deactivate that feature.

Thanks for the insight though, my freind.

OK. Shame. It would have been nice to have got to the bottom of it.