We need YOUR help in troubleshooting the email delivery issue(s)

[Steve]

Hi gang!

The auto email generation and delivery functionality for this forum has to my knowledge been broken for quite some time. Possibly years. Effectively, what should happen is that the server should send you guys an email whenever you receive any pressing notifications, such as private messages (Conversations) or when you voluntarily subscribe to a thread for updates. Admins should also receive emails whenever the Contact form (located in the footer area) is used - but I've just checked and that too is borked.

None of this is in no way down to the recent website upgrade - I was actually hoping it would fix this issue.

What I want to know is if any of you are still receiving emails from us (the subject line should include the suffix 'Devil May Cry Community'), or if you can recall approximately when you received the last email from this website. This will help me in troubleshooting the issue. My goal is to get the email functionality working again so that important notifications will be sent to your inbox (if you are happy for them to be allowed to).

Any info would be a big help, guys. Cheers!

Edit: Made a little more progress... now emails are ending up in my Spam folder...

Spoiler

Edit 2: Okay, took a few hours break and now I think I'm close to cracking it. I think that maybe my Outlook/Live emails might have been erroneously labelling all emails from here as spam and skewing my testing... hmm.

If anybody one is able to chime in with any info then it would be a big help.

Edit 3: Right-o, looks like everything is working perfectly now. I am receiving emails via the contact form in the footer, and I was sent an email notification of pending Conversation messages. If anybody else wants to let me know if they're receiving emails, or not receiving emails when they should be, it would still be a big help!

Edit 4: Looks like Outlook/Live accounts are extremely aggressive with their spam filtering methods, which did indeed make things more difficult to test. If you are signed up to this website with a @live or @outlook email address, you will almost certainly not receive email notifications from us of any kind. Gmail email accounts are completely unaffected and appear to receive our emails just fine.

 

[Carlos]

Blame this on the spammers, ladies and gentlemen. I, too was faced with this issue in one form or another. Not just from the site, but also my own sites, and other sites I go to. If you are using hotmail, live, or outlook for your websites - stop. Don't use it for your websites as an administrator. Use your site's domain name.

But I also learned that live/hotmail/outlook bans IP addresses from their servers. So, be careful when you deal with e-mails in any capacity when running sites.

 

[Steve]

It honestly blows my mind that Outlook can be so crazy-sensitive with its filtering. I only decided to shuffle through my Live amd Gmail email accounts as a last resort and low and behold, emails were coming through perfectly with Gmail. It probably added quite a few extra hours and headaches of troubleshooting.

In truth I prefer Google's solutions to Microsoft's, but I take issue to a lot of Google's dubious privacy practises, so when I changed my email address on file here from an @gmail to an @devilmaycry.org to an @live.co.uk, I honestly didn't expect there to be any issues. Makes me want to ditch Live altogether but I'm a little too invested at this point.

 

[Carlos]

Looks like Outlook/Live accounts are extremely aggressive with their spam filtering methods, which did indeed make things more difficult to test. If you are signed up to this website with a @live or @outlook email address, you will almost certainly not receive email notifications from us of any kind. Gmail email accounts are completely unaffected and appear to receive our emails just fine.

I know this is late, but I feel like I need to address this: I believe this is quite the opposite. I had a few sites behind @live accounts on my forum's contact fields, it had a problem sending emails to my users. But once I use my own domain name as a means of communication, it worked. At one point, I was IP banned from microsoft's servers, but I communicated with them on lifting the ban, and they did so. Now the problem is gone. The only problem boils down to the bounced emails which means users aren't putting the correct e-mails or aren't using it anymore. There are also fake e-mail addresses, so every quarter or so, I prune zero posts accounts sitting in "awaiting e-mail confirmation."

So, to reiterate: You can use your live accounts as a user, just as long as the site in question is NOT using live accounts as administrator. Because the filter thinks the administrator is a spammer using a software to send e-mails. Make sense?

As it stands now, you can't get emails from devilmaycry.org as a user on a live account. Yes, but it doesn't have to be that way. Look in e-mail options, @Steve. Read it thoroughly. I think there's a second layer of filtering that tells other e-mail servers that this is spam and whatnot.

Once I did understand it, I went like "oh. Okay."

 

[Sparda's rejected son]

I believe I turned off email notifactions a long time ago. I never needed them because once I logged in my feed would explode with alerts and messages. (Looks at feed: Wooo! I got a single Like from Shadow, I am such a boss.) I should look at my settings, Sparda only knows what I have toggled on and off.

 

[Steve]

@Carlos: That is very interesting indeed... I had considered re-using an @devilmaycry.org email to make things all official-sounding in notification emails and such, but I can't remember why I went against the idea. Going by your findings, I think that I'll try it out now and see how we get on. Cheers for the heads up!

Thankfully, I haven't received any warnings from the Outlook team... that I know of.

I believe I turned off email notifactions a long time ago. I never needed them because once I logged in my feed would explode with alerts and messages. (Looks at feed: Wooo! I got a single Like from Shadow, I am such a boss.) I should look at my settings, Sparda only knows what I have toggled on and off.

My feed is normally pretty barren, so I can't relate to that... :'(

 

[Sparda's rejected son]

@Carlos: That is very interesting indeed... I had considered re-using an @devilmaycry.org email to make things all official-sounding in notification emails and such, but I can't remember why I went against the idea. Going by your findings, I think that I'll try it out now and see how we get on. Cheers for the heads up!

Thankfully, I haven't received any warnings from the Outlook team... that I know of.


My feed is normally pretty barren, so I can't relate to that... :'(

Lies! I know people blow up your feed with questions about your goatee. Don't deny it.:bored: