In topic http://ukcaving.com/board/index.php/topic,6137.msg84346.html#msg84346 Bubba wrote...

There are ongoing problems with the email activation system when registering a new account or when changing your email address.

I've never been able to satisfactorily work out exactly what causes these problems; for most the system works fine, but quite a few people never get their activation emails.

Click to expand...

Thanks to whoever reactivated me when I got locked out recently, trying to change a password. I now realise that I have not received an email from this server for three years - no activation codes, reply notifications, PM notifications and no copy of the message I sent to admin via the web form.

I have looked into this in some detail - e.g. could it be spam settings somewhere that are blocking messages to me?  I dont think so: I have turned off every level of protection I could, including my ISPs optional spam filter. I tried three different email routes to me and still ... nothing!

I did think, at one time, that it was an issue to do with the SMTP-envelope-from setting being incorrectly applied, since some mail servers will discard incoming messages that do not have a valid return path. However, whilst one of the ISPs I use does do that, another doesnt, so it cant be that. Whatever it is, it is rather a nuisance. I know of one person who was trying for ages to contact me via this forum and I was not receiving any of his messages. (It was only months later I found his PM - so I guess I should log in more often).

Is this a common problem?

Thanks for this and your emails on the topic David - i've not had a chance to dig any deeper but your post gives some more possibilities.

It is seriously annoying and affects a significant minority of forum users.

Email notifications of PMs and topic posts seem to have stopped arriving for me.

I've been away for some weeks, and (until today) hadn't posted anything since 12th July, with my last notification arriving 17th August.

I did make posts today, and logged out and back in to see if that helped, but it doesn't seem to have done.

Any suggestions as to anything else I could try?

Still a mystery to me - I'll have a look at the server mail configuration again today and see if I can get any ideas.

I'm amazed at the amount of notifications you've got going, wouldn't it just be easier to log in once a day and see which topics have been replied to?

I only use notifications on topics that are old/obscure where people are unlikely to reply and it'd be easy to miss.

Apart from a very few, the notifications are automatic from threads I've posted in.

I guess I could try killing some old ones, though I assume the lack of emails isn't related to notification count, as it seemed to kick in in the middle of a period when I wasn't making posts.

I'll have a go at changing notification settings and see if I can get things working - there was one setting which looked odd (notifying me about moderation, but *maybe* not about replies), but altering that didn't seem to change things.

I've tried everything I can think of - changing any settings that look like they might possibly affect notifications, using a different email address in case the spam filter on the original was playing up, but nothing seems to have made a difference so far.

It's almost certainly a problem with the way the server handles email. It's hard to pin it down except for some basic patterns like if you use an aol email address then it definitely won't work.

I have problems sending to AOL myself.
I don't think the various email addresses I tried are likely to be blocking anything.

I'll leave things as they are for a while and see if it sorts itself out (some future SMF software update?)

Has the notification issue changed at all recently?

I've made some changes to the way the server handles email and I've noticed I'm having to manually activate far less accounts at the moment...could just be co-incidence of course.

I haven't had any notifications since the problem started.

As an attempt to get round the issue, I tried to create another account (to be used only to subscribe to topics I'd already posted in), but didn't get an activation email for it. The email account I used when signing up was hosted on a different domain to my main one, but on the same server.

I can't actually remember what account name I used, but I think it was something fairly obvious, to avoid it being thought of as a sock puppet (possibly 'potholer_2nd', or something like that?)
If the account *was* approved and therefore the activation email *should* have been sent, that would rule out anything special happening to the state of my regular ukcaving account as being the problem I was having, since a new account had the same issue.
I tried temporarily disabling the spam filter on my email server, but that didn't make any difference. As far as I know, I don't have problems receiving emails from anyone else.

If you're getting any new members, and not having lots of old ones asking 'what happened to my notifications?', emails must be being sent out to some or most people, so it isn't a global problem with the SMF mail settings being borked by a software upgrade, or anything like that.

For the moment, I just bookmarked my notifications page, so I can easily check to see if anything new has been posted.

I guess it's possible of course that things are getting blocked by your ISP  :-\

It's *possible*, but It doesn't seem likely.
My main email goes to mailservers running at a hosting company, on domains I control. Beyond the anti-spam, which I temporarily turned off, I doubt there'd be anything there blocking anything.

Also, I changed the email setting in my profile to an entirely different account, run by a longstanding webmail company, and that didn't seem to make any difference.

I suppose it's possible that both the webmail company *and* my regular domain host are somehow blocking emails from UkCaving (and apparently from nowhere else), with no input from me, but if that's happening, I'd guess it could be happening to all kinds of other people.

Agreed, in those scenarios it's highly unlikely, I was thinking more along the lines ISP supplied email boxes. Does seem odd with a webmail provider though, they're not usually that fussy.

I run my own mailservers with spam assassin and all comes through but it's not really much of a test as I suspect my stuff is all delivered locally due ukcaving being on the same box.

I spent a few hours after I upgraded the forum software trying to get to the bottom of this to no avail.

Played around with sendmail config files. I think part of the problem is that the hostname of my Virtual Server refers to a now defunct domain, so what I was trying to achieve was for sendmail to masquerade the hostname as the local domain name. The hostname "avatarweb.ltd.uk" should be overwritten as "server.ukcaving.com", etc but it doesn't seem to work properly.

I may be able to get my virtual server providers to change the hostname to a current domain and see if that makes any difference.

I don't really know anything about how the forum stuff works - does seem that some people have had email setup hassle after installation/upgrade, but I'd have thought that would be an all-or-nothing kind of thing.

Any errors in the error log?

A quick note from the newbie!
I had to have my activation done manually, ( a week or so ago), I have only posted a couple of times, one of the posts has been replied to, but no email arrived to say so!
Just thought I would mention it to say the problem still exists.

squeezer said:

A quick note from the newbie!
I had to have my activation done manually, ( a week or so ago), I have only posted a couple of times, one of the posts has been replied to, but no email arrived to say so!
Just thought I would mention it to say the problem still exists.

Click to expand...

That's interesting, because I received a "Topic Reply" email in response to your posting, and its the first time I have EVER received one!  Im wondering if Bubba has "done something" very recently?  I'll do a few tests.

DavidGibson said:

I'll do a few tests.

Click to expand...

Heyyyy!  Its working.  I sent myself an email and it arrived. I sent myself a PM and an email arrived!  If youve done something, Bubba, ...  . If you havent ...

Squeezer: you said you had not received a Topic Reply message. I have noticed on the BCA board that not all postings that you would think ought to generate a Topic Reply email actually do so. I think it depends on exactly which bit of a thread someone replies to. But that's different software over at BCA so ... shrug. Not sure if it apples here.

What I did yesterday was get the hostname changed on the server. The old hostname was referring to a dead domain that was my old business domain.

I've changed it to "www.ukbouldering.com" now. I reckoned that since the old hostname wasn't a live domain some mail servers were rejecting the mail when they did a lookup.

Fingers crossed it'll help solve some of these issues.

I just got a notification for this thread, so it looks like it worked for me.

Many thanks.

Good stuff - might have finally found the problem