Deactivated Account Still Receives Emails

I have deactivated a user account under ‘Permissions’ in Discourse. Where it states that the user will need to reactivate their email (I am hoping that this can force them to change their email and also, not attempt to email them anymore).

The user has made posts, as they had activated their account previously via email confirmation link. I can see that the system is still emailing them with updates on thread responses, despite the fact that the account/email has been deactivated. I deactivated the account in the hopes that they will not be emailed anymore as their address hard bounces in Mandrill.

Mandrill only blacklists bad email addresses for about 14 days, so depending on them 100% isn’t wise.

If this won’t be supported, is there another way of disabling discourse from attempting to mail certain users? I can manually disable them after checking the mandrill logs. I only need to disable accounts that have been activated already, but for some reason start to hard bounce later as the email address was closed or something. For initial activation emails, the mandrill suppression blacklist is sufficient.

Thanks!

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Have you gone to their Profile Preferences and unchecked all of the “email me” settings?

I guess that is a good point, if you deactivate an email that implies you do not trust it, and it should not be emailed. I guess the mailing code should have a common function all emails pass through that check this state before sending @techapj.

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@Mittineague - Thanks, I reactivated their accounts, impersonated them, unchecked all the ‘email me’ settings and deactivated their accounts again. Should solve this for now, although a little bit tedious.

@codinghorror - Thanks for the response. That would be perfect, even better would be to integrate with the Mandrill api to automatically deactivate hard-bounce email addresses in Discourse.

Seconding this for a similar use case, updating a user’s email.

Sometimes a user changes their email (and lets the community know in various ways - e.g. over social media channels) but forgets to update it in their Discourse profile. As a helpful admin, I can change the email in their Public Profile -> Preferences but Discourse will still email the old address until the new one is confirmed.

A secondary problem here is that there is no UI indication that the email address was changed and different admins won’t know that one of them had already started the process of changing the user’s email address.

This is now fixed via:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/4e5228dc9eb0325babfd0c688a737bdde3a8d8e4

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But the deactivated user can still get a new email confirmation email, yes? Just wanted to double check there…

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Yes, confirmation emails can/will be sent to deactivated user.

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