A forum where no email worked and nobody could reach the admin panel

Signup confirmations and alerts had stopped sending, so new members couldn't register, and then the admin account locked itself out because password resets went through the same broken email.

The objective

The board had been inherited from a previous owner. No forum email was reaching anyone, so registration confirmations never arrived and the staff were activating accounts by hand.

Then the admin account itself became inaccessible. A password reset would normally sort that out, except the reset email went through the same broken mail path, so there was no way back in from the front end.

They did have database and server access, which is the only reason a fix was possible at all.

What I did

I got back into the admin account through the database rather than the reset flow.

I traced why mail wasn't being delivered and fixed the sending configuration, which meant going to the hosting provider's support directly instead of guessing at their mail restrictions.

Once it was working again I upgraded the board to the current version, and dealt with the problems that surfaced along the way.

The result

Email and admin access were both working again within about an hour. The upgrade followed after that.