Email stuff

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I slightly changed the email settings to now to maybe use the username of the poster (instead of the really silly names). Let’s see how that works.

The more important reason why I made this thread and one that I’d like to hear feedback on is the email service.
Right now this forum uses mailgun which we can use for free as the volume of email is pretty low.
But it has some issues: some users don’t receive mail because the ip that mailgun happened to assign to us got blacklisted (it changes every now and then) by someone abusing their service and causing also issues for us (it would cost a ton of money to have mailgun give us a dedicated ip to avoid this issue). The other is that sometimes it takes a bit long for mailgun to decide to send out an email. I made this thread now as I took a look at the mailgun logs for the first time in a while.

So what is the alternative? Right now one that I’m considering is using an email server already installed on this server, the same one that the development forum uses. As that is not shared it shouldn’t get blacklisted (unless it already is, because then I’d have to try to contact any blacklists that have it in order to unlist it) and there is no mail send limit other than how much mail one server can send out (which should be even higher than the free usage on mailgun). The big problem with this approach is that it seems that gmail, for example, very easily puts messages from my server into spam for some reason that I don’t know, but luckily it seems to only put the first email into spam and then all subsequent ones (after marking the first as not spam) actually go to the inbox.

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Glad you changed the username shown instead of the nickname.

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I don’t know a whole lot about things like this, but I feel like having only the first e-mail possibly getting marked as spam would be better than some people not being able to use the mail service at all (then again, I personally don’t use the mail system, so…)

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@Untrustedlife, @Oliveriver do you have something to comment on this?

I think I’m going to try changing later today to see how it goes. I’ll create a thread in announcements to let everyone know to check their spam folders in a few days to make sure they didn’t miss anything. There will be about 20 minutes of downtime during changing the email sending option.

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I hardly ever get emails from either forum since I think I turned them off unless I don’t visit for a week. I therefore don’t have much experience with the email side of things so probably can’t provide much of a useful opinion.

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Let’s see if this other service works better (might be worth it to add text to the signup form to ask people to check their spam folder and umark our emails as spam.

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Not really. No real comment. I like getting emails so I can see when people say interesting things not much else.

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Then you better check your spam folder sometime soon.

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After a lot of trouble I managed to add nice looking messages reminding people to check their spam folder:
Kuvakaappaus%20-%202018-07-01%2018-00-08Kuvakaappaus%20-%202018-07-01%2018-00-15

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