Email in stopped working... halp šŸ˜•

Support
1

Today, @smcalear informed me that emails she was sending to our Discourse instance were no longer showing up.

I checked some things out and found the following:

  1. Nothing I know of changed on the system between when it was working (12 noon) and when it was observed to no longer be working (12:30 pm)

  2. The emails are being sent to the correct address ourforum+categorything@gmail.com

  3. The gmail inbox weā€™re using for email in is still being polled successfully.
    It is set up to ā€œarchive emailsā€ after they are accessed via POP, and indeed, the emails in were getting archived.

  4. https://ourforum.com/admin/email/received does not show any of the new emails

  5. https://ourforum.com/admin/email/rejected does not show any of the new emails

  6. https://ourforum.com//logs does not show anything suspect

Any ideas about what could be going on or where to look next?

2

Any ideas here @zogstrip?

3

Is or was something forwarding email to the Gmail account? Could something have broken there?

4

No, this is just me sending emails directly to the accountā€¦ and I can see that the emails are being accessed (since they are being archived).

Looking into this more and hereā€™s some more info:

I logged in and grepped through the logs in rails/production.log, but didnā€™t see anything.

I tailed that file and sent 4 more emails. 3 of them worked, but 1 did not. I copied and pasted the subject and body of the failing one to a new email and that worked. So it does not seem to be content related.

Iā€™m looking in lib/email/processor.rb and it seems like failures should be logged via the log_email_process_failure method in most cases.

But I see now that there is a log_mail_processing_failures site setting which is disabled by default.

Turning that on now and sending more mails to see if a new failure shows up in any logsā€¦

Update: got one more failure, but still donā€™t see anything in any logsā€¦

:facepalm: Dā€™oh, I found the problemā€¦

I set up a ā€œstagingā€ site a few weeks ago to test another migration. I restored a backup there and made notes to turn off certain settings (like outgoing email). But I did not turn of the POP3 polling there for incoming email.

Sure enough, I see all the ā€œmissingā€ emails listed there on the ā€œreceivedā€ and ā€œrejectedā€ email tabs.

I will go ahead and turn off the polling there (and update my notes)

Thanks for rubber ducking this with me everyone! :baby_chick:

(cc @smcalear)

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