Email Outage - Updates?


What's the latest update on the email problem? I'm a little surprised that I haven't seen anything after nearly 3 days. http://status.insided.com/



(link to specific issue)



Thanks,

-Drew

23 replies

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I'm also curious to know 🙂
Hey guys, just to let you know we're making good progress on the issue. Email functionality has been restored, but the platform has a large amount of emails to catch up on first.



We'll be updating the status page shortly with more information so stay tuned!
I still haven't received any emails 😞
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I still haven't received any emails :(



Me neither 🙁 @tom.shaddock should I have received emails by now?
I got the notification for your reply!

No backlogged email has arrived though.
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I got the notification for your reply!

No backlogged email has arrived though.




I also got the notification for your reply 👍🏻 But no backlogged emails here either 😞
Hi guys, so basically we decided not to release the queue in one big heap without without at least informing the clients first. As doing so could lead to other unwanted ramifications:


  1. Users would in theory get emails for events that occurred nearly 5 days ago - this could cause some confusion.
  2. As so many emails are backlogged we have to be extra careful that we do not exceed our allowed sent mail quotas as doing so would cause emails to stop working.

The source of the shutdown was our hosting provider shutting down our email service without any form of warning. They claimed that our bounce rate for non existent emails was too high - the cause of this was a very large spam attack on one of our customer forums (an SSO only forum - a case in which we cannot stop fake emails from being registered as we don't control the registration mechanism).



Therefore we are currently investigating the idea of not sending the email queue at all - we are curious as to what our users' sentiment on this is? Critical emails like new registrations are able to re-trigger the email confirmation message again by logging into the community front end once more.



Regards,



Tom
@tom.shaddock assume this is a one size fits all, as in you cannot offer different solutions by community?



I.e for us, I'd want us to send all 5 days worth, but appreciate your challenges and also that might not be appropriate for all communities.



I'd want users to be reminded someone replied to then, we had a superuser flag the issue to us as well directly as they'd "found" that someone had tagged or replied and they didn't get notified.



Just my thoughts of course..



Darran
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Hi,



from perspective of a power-user I'd say: cut and just restart fresh as to not to spam their inboxes.



However, as we have many users who are infrequent users and posted just one question, for them their one email that is in the queue is important.



Hence: deliver the entire queue.



Cheers,



Florian
from perspective of a power-user I'd say: cut and just restart fresh as to not to spam their inboxes.



However, as we have many users who are infrequent users and posted just one question, for them their one email that is in the queue is important.



Hence: deliver the entire queue.




Hi,



I agree with @Florian - a lot of our customers ask just one question as well and need to be notified that their topic has been answered. 👍
Hi, I think that you should not send these 2 million emails.

It really will confuse users and they will think that this is SPAM.



And users has already read all their PMs and topics if it is really important for them.
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Might be not to send these emails as it can cause some confusion and look like spam.

You might want to open a poll on this to see what others think
I think if you could send the past 24h worth of email, we'd all still be in good shape. Are there filtering options that could keep the registration/reset emails from going out?



I'm just glad it's working again!
Userlevel 2
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Hi all,



thanks a lot for your comments!



We have decided not to send the emails now due to the following reasons:



1. The oldest notifications are from Sunday afternoon. Users will mostly be confused when receiving them this late



2. Registration-emails sent to users have been expired, so they cannot activate their account with this email any more. Users that just registered (on communities not using SSO login) can re-confirm their account by logging in to the community and clicking 'confirm email' banner on the homepage after login.



3. Newly registered users who have asked a question / started a topic will be confused by this mail as well, as they do not expect that notifications will be sent. Receiving them many days later will not be good for their experience.



I think if you could send the past 24h worth of email, we'd all still be in good shape. Are there filtering options that could keep the registration/reset emails from going out?


I am afraid we would not be able to work out a logic like this in the short time before the weekend - and next week it probably would also be too late for this.



Cheers,



Julian
Agreed Julian, but I have a future idea that might also help in direct marketing ways.



So far, right now its not possible to send direct mails at will via the platform.



In this specific example the user experience of a large number of new users was negatively affected because they didn't receive any notifications about reactions or answers.



In such a case we would like to mail an apology to these users that they might have missed something.



As of right now that would have to be through the steps of exporting posts and user rapports and mix and matching them manually. Next to that this option will be limited to the email a company can send, in our case, we cant send via no-reply.



I see it as a much faster and user friendly option to have a built-in email system from which mods will be able to send an email by the platform (no-reply) directly by selecting users based on rank or other criteria.



I couldn't find this idea anywhere yet, maybe it has been discussed?



Cheers.
Oh cool, it's broken again 😟
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@tom.shaddock @Julian I did not receive any mail notifications from this community, InSpired, yesterday. (Even though several topics I subscribe received comments).



Is there something wrong again? Mail notifications in our community seem to be working just fine.
Userlevel 2
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Hi Suvi,



thanks for reporting this! I am not aware of an issue, I received my notifications yesterday & today as far as I can see. Hoping you will receive a notification for this reply...



I will wait for my colleague arrive at the office, so that we can check in our logs. I will get back to you once I know more.
Userlevel 2
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So we just had a quick look. We can see that the notification for my reply above was sent to you, however no notification yesterday.



Am I right in the assumption that it was about a reply in this topic?



We are checking now in more detail, e.g. if this topic has been saved as a subscribed topic for your account, just to rule out any other factors (or root causes for this issue).



Will come back once I have more info.
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@Julian Yes, that topic among others. I have not received any notifications about your replies in this topic either.



I've not received any emails from this community since last week, even though new replies can be found at least in these topics



https://community.insided.com/got-a-question-38/email-outage-updates-1437#post5436



https://community.insided.com/got-a-question-38/insided-information-policy-testing-and-deployment-1564



https://community.insided.com/news-platform-updates-16/roadmap-update-12-1570#post5418



https://community.insided.com/news-platform-updates-16/advance-warning-some-permissions-will-be-removed-from-the-moderator-primary-role-1248#post5403
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@Julian And I've solved the problem - for some odd reason my email suddenly thought that your mail notifications were junk. Am solving the problem at our end 🙂
Userlevel 2
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haha thanks Suvi for this update! :)



Weird as my colleague did not locate notifications in our logs - maybe he did not search it well enough?



In any case, thanks for sharing that info, I will close the ticket then. 🙂
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Hahaha @Julian - at least I received a mail notification of your latest reply 🙂

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