If you are a Gmail user it’s quite likely that notifications from the forum are either going straight into your spam folder or not being delivered at all.
I don’t know if this is a recent change in the way Gmail works or if it’s always been this way. I’m aware of it now because of other ongoing work that I’m doing with the forum email system which means I can now see more status details for outgoing emails.
I’m working on a solution but it might take a few days for me to complete this work. I’ll post again when I think it’s fixed.
Sometime soon (hopefully today) notification emails will arrive from [email protected] (note it’s a .co.uk domain). If you have spam protections in place based on email addresses, please add this new address to your list.
Mail delivery is via MailJet. Probably not important for you to know, but I’ll mention it just in case you notice the different source server.
I’ve successfully sent a test message to a @gmail.com address and it didn’t end up in the spam folder. Emails to this address had previously failed completely and I eventually cajoled them into the spam folder. So I’m hoping that GMail users will now see emails from the forum delivered to their Inbox.
I can now more easily monitor bounced emails, e.g. where an account no longer exists or the inbox is full. After a number of bounces for an address the system will stop sending emails to that user. You will need to revalidate your email address to resume getting notifications delivered to you.
There’s another email related feature coming up soon, but I want to confirm that the new email delivery system is working properly before I tell you about it.
If you’ve looked closely you’ll see that the notification messages have a different looking FROM address format now, apart from being from weather-watch.co.uk. It will be something like ‘[email protected]’ where xxxxx is some random looking hex numbers. The special FROM address means that you are now able to reply to notifications you receive from the forum. So if you get a notification email but don’t want to log in to send a reply, you can now reply by email.
There are a few things to remember:
You don’t have the forum interface to prompt you how to do things like BOLD, ITALICS, etc. If you can remember the codes/BBCode to do it you can still include it in your message and it will be interpreted correctly.
The forum post rules apply, so you must send at least 20 characters in a reply to a forum post or 10 characters in a reply to a Personal Message (PM). If your message doesn’t meet the rules the forum will mail you back to tell you.
You must reply from the email address you have registered on the forum If your mail is forwarded and you reply from a different address your message will be rejected. You are able to register multiple email addresses (look in your profile) and the forum will happily accept replies from primary or secondary addresses, so that’s the fix if your mail is forwarded.
Replies will appear in the usual place in the relevant topic or in the PM thread that originated the notification. You can see if a post/PM was sent by email by looking for a small letter icon to the left of the sender’s avatar/name.
I think that’s all for now. I’ll be watching notifications and replies for a while to check that this is working properly, but you may already have seen some testing that’s been going on so I think it will be OK.
