ALERT: Email notifications not working

[csnyder]

NOTE: I just got an email from our email provider (SparkPost) that the account was suspended due to concerns about violation of their anti-spam policy. I'm going to get in touch with them to get it fixed (I'm guessing it's due to the flood of email the software sent out after the import was complete), but in the meantime password resets, notifications, etc. won't work.

[csnyder]

This topic is now a banner. It will appear at the top of every page until it is dismissed by the user.

[csnyder]

This topic is no longer a banner. It will no longer appear at the top of every page.

[csnyder]

[julio]

FYI, I did go through the accounts of all users who 1) have not updated their passwords and become fully activated; and 2) were receiving daily digest emails. I turned off the digest emails for those users. This looks like it will have eliminated a couple of hundred emails/day.

Fortunately, the rate of password resets has declined, as our "regular" users are mostly through that. Our occasional users may be impacted until it's cleared up. As for notifications - even without the emails, if we're getting badges on the avatar (little green/red/blue dots) it's not the end of the world - we should be able to keep up with important things.

[csnyder]

Great—thanks for taking care of that. My hunch is that those emails hit a large portion of inactive email addresses, which likely triggered some automated spam filters (or, people that had no interest in receiving them marked them as spam).

[julio]

FYI - We've turned off email notifications until this issue is resolved. You should still receive in-board notifications - little colored dots on your avatar in the upper right, notifications on the list below that, and desktop notifications if you've enabled that - they're all working for me.

[csnyder]

I'm emailing back and forth with the SparkPost compliance team. Found this one amusing:

Your account has been suspended for sending suspicious links. Can you please explain why you were sending the following link?

http://www.milb. com/player/index.jsp?

I explained that we're a site talking about baseball, so someone was probably linking to a player's profile. Hope to have this resolved soon...

[csnyder]

Update: Email is back! SparkPost has unlocked the account. Hopefully, with the work that @julio did to disable the daily digest emails for the dormant users (thanks for doing all of that button-clicking, julio!), we shouldn't encounter this issue again.

[csnyder]

[julio]

I'll be keeping an eye on outgoing email for a while, just to make sure we have a good idea what our outgoing volume is.

To all: If you're getting too many emails (some of you appear to be "watching" multiple threads, which means you get an email any time anybody posts in those threads), you can control that by 'tracking' a thread rather than 'watching' it.

With regard to the digest email - digests are sent when you have not visited the site (logged in - if you browse the topics without logging in the board has no idea you were here - duh!). In your settings, you can control how often digests are set - from daily (most frequent) to once every two weeks (least frequent). If you're not a daily visitor - think about how much email you want!