Tonight I forgot my admin password. Thought: no problem! Hit the “Lost Password?” link at the WordPress login screen.

Now, that might happen once in a lifetime: PHP was not able to talk to the local mailserver! Therefore no password was sent!

The first thing to do was a quick ckeck:

 function helpme() {
  if(mail("please@help.me","test","test")) {
   echo "success";
  } else {
   echo "error";
  }
 }
helpme();

helpme() returned “success” but nothing happened. No email at my inbox.

After checking DNS-MX records and looking at phpinfo() it was crystal clear that there must be a server misconfiguration. Since I do not have root access to this machine, I wrote a small script, to help me out. It is a simple admin-password resetter containimg a form for setting a new admin password. The POST-value is overwrites the unretrievable on in the WordPress database:

	$sql = "UPDATE ".$wpdb->users."
                  SET user_pass = '".md5($_POST['emergency_pass'])."'
                  WHERE user_login = 'admin'";
	$link = $wpdb->query($sql);
	wp_redirect('wp-login.php');
	exit();

Download: WordPress Admin Password Resetter

Usage:

1. Unzip
2. Upload password-resetter.php to your WordPress root (!this is NOT a WordPress Plugin!)
3. run http://[your WordPress URI]/password-resetter.php
4. set a new password
5. Very important: DELETE password-resetter.php