Forum internal: Missing Email notifications?

Kernel
1

Hi there,

sorry for posting this here, but I haven’t found a place to contact a site admin or ask questions about the forum software itself…

I have Email notifications enabled, and so far, this has worked very reliably in the past. However, for two days now, I have not received any notification mail for new forum posts.

Before I contact my Email provider, I would just like to confirm that this is not an issue with the forum. Thus, has anyone else experienced similar problems, or is everything working as usual if you have Email notifications enabled?

Thanks!

2

I’m getting notifications, so it isn’t a site-wide issue.

3

Thanks, Richard! Well appreciated.

4

I’m also getting email notifications, and can’t see any issues within the forum’s backend.

5

Thanks to you as well, appears to be a problem on my provider’s side. It is fine to delete this thread now as far as I am concerned.

6

Sorry for bringing this up again… @rtel , would it be possible for you to get me in touch with an admin person via PM so we don’t need to get everybody involved? I checked with my provider, and they said they can only get involved with support of the message’s sender. They couldn’t locate any obvious problem on their side.

Thanks and apologies again to the community for making the issue public temporarily!

7

Will pass on a link to this post.

8

Thanks to everyone involved in helping me via PM!

Just to wrap up the issue for anyone interested:

From what I can tell, it turns out that your Email hoster (Civilized Discourse Construction Kit Inc., sending mails from an IP address range that contains the 64.71.144.217) has made it to the global black list of my Email provider, the Deutsche Telekom (DT), implying that nobody serviced by the DT will receive Emails sent through the discourse domain anymore.

Unfortunately, the DT very simply refuses to accept complaints from anyone but Discourse Mail. I have typed my fingers bloody, but all I keep getting back is “have the people at discourse complain with DT. Nothing else gets you anywhere.”

This is NOT Deutsche Telekom Bashing. In fact, they provide very stable and reliable services with decent support. Their spam filtering technique is so elaborate that I hardly ever get any junk - yet the downside is that there are also a number of mails I’d like to get that they swallow. Oh well.

Of course, I’m aware of techniques to work around the issue, such as obtaining a “disposable” mail address from another provider for notifications like these. Yet that’s not the issue here; I’m basically concerned about my provider deciding for me beyond my control which mails to withhold (and therebye risking false spam positives which I don’t approve of).

Anyways, no reaction required here, again just to wrap up the issue. I understand that there are very likely at least two indirections between the forum admins and the hosting company so that the chances of activating anyone at Discoure are practically nil.

Thanks!

9

@RAc, I’ll bring this to Discourse’s attention and see if they can’t escalate and find a resolution. This impacts all their customers and since they provide online communities for so many critical brands, hopefully DT is willing to find a solution with them

1 Like
10

I can see that the e-mails are no longer bouncing back. We will continue monitoring the situation the next few days. Hopefully this is permanently resolved for you and anyone else who uses DT as their ISP.

11

Hello Richard, this has happened again. Apparently Discourse Mail also provides Email services to Spammers which is causing my provider to blacklist all Emails from Discourse’s IP address range.

This must be resolved by Discourse. Last time I helped out, but it was a tedious everlasting process for which I never got as much as a thank you from anyone.

If this ends up in AWS terminating my account because the forum bots keep telling me that they can’t reach me by Email but respond to my responses via Email again, so be it, apparently my forum presence isn’t anything AWS is interested in.

I am perfectly aware that I could easily resolve the situation by getting a disposable free Email address, but that can not be a solution.

Apologies again for making this public, but there does not appear to be a way to reach a human administrator via the forum, only bots, and you configured your account to prohibit PMs.

12

Hmm - let me look into it. Of course you are a very valuable member of our community!

13

It looks like 216.66.8.57 gets blocked, although not by any of the top spam services…looking for a solution for you.

14

Thanks Richard, best of luck - I am sure that the DT, being a very big email provider in Germany, has its own hygiene algorithms based only in parts of “official” spam lists. Last time I got access to the bounce message which not only contained the bounce reason but also the contact email address at DT. In a very ironic twist of events, Discourse did eventually (with my intervention) fill in the paperwork required by DT and sent it back - but that very email got stuck in the spam filter at DT and thus did not get processed timely.

15

@RAc Good news - this should have been fixed but will take a while to propagate to the servers. I’m told that should complete by 3pm CEST tomorrow - after which I will unblock your email in the forum software too.

1 Like
16

One year later: I just discovered that I didn’t receive emails for 24 days.
Now I check if I get an email on this post.

17

I didn’t receive emails for 24 days.

Although all of my email addresses are OK, it helped to change the registered email address.

18

@htibosch just confirming - you did get the email notifications?

19

just for the record, my email notification policy currently appears completly random - I do seem to receive notifications, but not all of them, and sometimes many hours after they arose. No discernible pattern. Perfect entropy generator.