Hello,
I run a Discourse server at Digital Ocean which polls our incoming email address at a cPanel-based shared hosting provider to retrieve messages to post to Discourse. It’s generally worked very well for a couple of years, but stopped working yesterday - the mailbox received an email yesterday at 3:44 pm, and that DID get picked up by our DO Discourse instance, but three emails that came in shortly after that are not getting picked up. (The emails appear in the shared host’s cPanel Email portal, so they ARE arriving; Discourse is just not able to retrieve them.)
This is not an issue of too much volume; we get 0-10 incoming emails a day, usually closer to 0 than 10.
Discourse’s logs are showing
Job exception: Net::ReadTimeout
- I’ve tried changing the POP3 interval (it was 7 minutes, it’s now 3 minutes).
- I’ve updated Discourse to 2026.3.0-latest.
- I’ve restarted the DO droplet server.
None of that has helped.
(I note that the Net::ReadTimeout message only appears in the logs every half hour or hour, nowhere near every 7 or 3 minutes.)
Digital Ocean has said nothing has changed on their systems that would cause this; my cPanel/email hosting vendor says nothing has changed on their systems that would cause this.
This same thing happened back in August - POP3 retrieval just stopped working - and then it started working again within a few days, while I was still going back and forth with the support folks at DO and my other host.
Can you suggest anything I can try to get POP3 retrieval working again?
Thank you!