Sounds like it must be some problems with your (shared) host not sending our Emails. Is
"UserValidationByEmail" enabled ? The confirmation Email is tracked via metadata - you most probably do not want to mess around with the databse tables to try and fix this. Meanwhile... PlugIn "Simple User Management" will let you activate new users.
Thanks for that. I'd still like to get to the bottom of this: I don't want user registration to be 'hit and miss'. But the 'Simple User management plugin was a good tip, and seems to have done the trick. Thanks again.
If some users receive the activation emails I would say sending emails works for your site. The problem is that some email providers might not only move these emails to the spam folders of the email accounts but don't deliver them at all. Not only yahoo and hotmail, but also att, aol, msn, live.com and some others seem to do that at least sometimes.
Assuming you have CPanel access or a similar admin tool you can check via webmail if there are any Non Delivery Messages sent back. If you get such messages they will contain some error code telling you the reason why the email was not delivered. You might not get these error emails to your site admin email account but to the default return email set for your server (root@... or admin@...).
Some email providers want to validate the server the emails are sent from, for example via DomainKeys or SPF records. Aol and att also want a valid PTR record for reverse DNS lookup.
If your server is too new they might also deny email delivery. You could also check if your server's IP address is on some blacklists for example spamhaus.org or senderbase.org. The IP address might have been added to the blacklist due to the site that has used your IP before you started with your site.
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