UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.classic [Archived] UBB.classic Bugs Mail Issues [NOTABUG]

Various people have told me over the last few months that they do not get their passwords sent out, but I have never been able to pin down the cause. Sendmail is working fine and the majority of people are getting the mail fine, but from time to time people mail me that they never received the mail. I don't know if they're making it up (after incidentally deleting the mail), but this is very annoying to me, having to mail them their registration info. I want to get to the bottom of this too.

This is more of a feature request than not, but how about implementing a Success/Fail status on the delivery of the registration mail? And adding in the control panel the ability to repeat the process, sending the registration info to them again with a click on the button... I think anyone running a larger board would very much appreciate this.

I also got one person mailing me, telling me they did get the registration mail, but that it only contained the subject line... The actual message body was simply blank. He forwarded it to me, so I can confirm that.

I know there's a number of reasons why stuff like this could happen, so I'm wondering if this is happening to anyone else...

[This message was edited by Charles Capps on October 22, 2002 at 12:22 PM.]

This is not a bug - if your mail system is being flaky, then you need to speak to your web hosting provider.

How would a success or fail system work? I don't see how... we can't very well send a read reciept.

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Charles Capps
UBB.classic™ Developer
Having problems? Open up a support ticket!

I'm running a dedicated server and sendmail works perfectly, as well as everything else.

You could implement success/fail in a couple of different ways... I know that when I was still running a Raq, I got every bounced subscription mail sent right back to my admin mail... And there were DOZENS every week, stupid people registering with fake e-mail accounts. (Obviously no one reads that their pass gets sent there.)

So you could track mails that bounce back, at least, and have those accounts automatically deleted.

Then there's the way vB does it. Sends you a mail with a link you need to hit to activate your account. Only after you do that, you can actually post. This is the best way you could go, IMO. No activation = deletion of the account after a set number of days. Perfect.

Not quite perfect. Click-to-confirm can be confusing and troublesome for a number of users, which then turns into a major support issue. If we implement a verification system, it will probably trigger during the user's first login. (I.e. you'll be able to search for accounts that have never logged in / by last confirmed login day. Eventually, that is.)

Anyway.

The only thing I could advise at this point is watching the sendmail logs to see if the mails UBB sends out actually get to sendmail, then if sendmail actually sends them out.

In all other respects, the mails are perfectly normal and should be bouncing to the email address on record with sendmail... perhaps it's bouncing to postmaster, which bounces somewhere else that is not regularly monitored?

We've tried setting the Errors-To address ourself, but have found that most MTAs never respect it.

--
Charles Capps
UBB.classic™ Developer
Having problems? Open up a support ticket!

[This message was edited by Charles Capps on October 07, 2002 at 09:07 AM.]

Hah! More confusing and troublesome than their not getting the registration mail at all? I don't think so. At least if they have trouble with clicking on an activation link (?!), they'll bother to ask. If their registration info never reaches them, only a miniscule number of them will bother to mail me and tell me about it, and I'd have to send it to them manually. Which still happens pretty often, and looking it up in the CP every time it does is a PITA. So no, it can't be a bigger support issue than it already is for me. And probably for everyone else running at least a moderately-sized board.

And as I said, I'm sure sendmail works fine (new people are coming on the boards, and it shows in the last 50 members), so I don't really know what it could be. There's a tendency for people with AOL mails to tell me they never got their passwords though. How could I tell if AOL was blocking registration mails sent from my board? Or discarding it as spam or whatnot... I don't know where it's bouncing, but definitely somewhere that's not monitored...

AOL users have the option of blocking mail from outside domains / people they don't know... often this is switched on without knowing exactly what they're doing.

It is possible (though unlikely) that they are discarded as spam.

--
Charles Capps
UBB.classic™ Developer
Having problems? Open up a support ticket!