Admin email screened and rejected when replying to thread by email

For a few weeks now, we face issues when one of our admins replies directly by email to a thread.
All his replies are not appearing on the thread. For each, we get this message Email::Receiver::ScreenedEmailError. The email he uses is the one he has on record for his profile.

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Has this persons email been added to the screened emails (blocked emails) list? Check in admin, logs.

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The persons email is not part of screened email list.

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@codinghorror we found out what was happening! The screened email method is not finding matches by equality, but with some distance algorithm (levenshtein). A user was blocked and it was only 2 characters different from the admin email, giving a false positive.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/514c22e64b8b3aa95dde0456116fad5b954df384/app/models/screened_email.rb#L31

I know there is a setting for that distance, but I wonder if moderators/admins shouldn’t be protected or even if strict matching should be the default.

Thanks for creating such an awesome tool BTW.

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Wow that is a first! I wonder if we should exempt staff from this check but it has to be sooo rare.

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Should we allow established users who already have accounts to bypass this check regardless?

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