Debugging missing Welcome Email

Started by manu3d, October 25, 2016, 10:58:19 AM

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manu3d

An SMF2.x-based forum I have recently setup for the benefit of my neighborhood (65+ families) has recently gone live.

So far this has happened without major problems but there has been one nagging issue: on user creation some users didn't receive their welcome email. 

I am using the "admin immediate" method: I use the Registration menu in the admin menus and I do not request user activation. This causes the email with username, password and some additional information to normally go straight out. In some cases this has been classified as spam (i.e. on gmail accounts) and once I realized this was happening I warned every user about it and various welcome emails have been found in spam folders.

However, a small number of users did not find the email at all, even looking in their spam folder or searching for the email sender.

I cannot find anything accounting for this in the forum's behavior on user creation (no error reported), in the forum's logs (no relevant error) and as I'm on a shared host and I do not have direct access to the sendmail functionality I have asked their support to look for me: still no error.

I am tempted to think that the emails did arrive and are hiding somewhere were the users cannot find them. But is there anything else I should try on the server side to debug this problem?

Kind regards,

Manu


vbgamer45

Could be a couple of different things.
If some people got the email could be a spam filter that is blocking others from getting. It would be be based on your sending ip reputation.
You could look at the email logins on the server itself and see if they are getting blocked by places such as yahoo,hotmail,gmail etc
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manu3d

Thank you @vbgamer45 for your reply.

Indeed some users get the email and therefore I think spam filters are more likely. But some of them can't find those emails anywhere, not even in their spam folders, hence my question.

Good point about ip reputation. The server is probably on a respectable domain/ip, but our specific domain is very new and I guess it has a neutral or perhaps even negative starting reputation having just started.

Also good point about checking the member list to find any pattern regarding users that haven't logged in once yet. I just checked and the only pattern is a good number of gmail users having not logged in yet. But I was already aware that gmail does tag those emails as spam and I follow up on the welcome email with a direct email warning about this, so that the user checks the spam folder.

Some users however still do not find the welcome email, even if they check the spam folder or if the search for the address "[email protected]", which is how the reply-to field is set. I guess I should verify what the from field is set to and ask them to search for that.

Thank you again for the suggestions vbgamer45! 

Kindred

in some cases.. like hotmail, for example, the block might be happening at the server, before the mail is even delivered to the user's mailbox
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manu3d

That's scary, as it sounds like the user can't do anything about it. Is there anything that can be done to report to hotmail a website erroneously classified as spam-generating?

vbgamer45

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