Email notifications not sent for PMs to built-in groups

Support
1

Built-in group moderators has ‘Default notification level for group messages’ set to ‘Watching’, but no emails are sent to members of this group on new group PMs (‘Email me when I am sent a personal message’ is enabled in users’ profiles, and email notification for group PMs works for all custom groups).

Was I under a false impression that this used to work before and has somehow regressed recently, or this never worked for builtin groups at all?

If it is the latter it would be most unfortunate, as I just had an issue with the plugin which prevented specifically moderators from logging in (I alerted them via group PM to moderators group for a temporary workaround, but apparently no one got the email and there was no other way to communicate with them, since no one could log in).

4

I’ve just given this a run-through here on meta and I received an email for the PM notification:

moderator PM notification received
moderator PM notification received1035×277 21.9 KB

Is there any info in your email logs about ones being sent or skipped?

1 Like
5

There’s nothing in the mail logs (Admin web console) when sent to @moderators. If I send PM directly to group members email is logged and delivered.

Are there any more datailed logs on disk for me to check?

6

I think I would track this backwards. If they didn’t get the email, did they get the PM notification? If they didn’t get the PM notification in the first place then I would check whether they have the moderators inbox as ‘Watching’ (even if it’s default Watching, individuals may not have that set depending on when the default was set, or if they’ve changed it).

If you have the data explorer installed, this should be enough to get an overview without needing to impersonate:

SELECT 
    user_id,
    notification_level
FROM group_users
WHERE group_id = 2
  AND user_id > 0
7

It seems that most members have set notifications for this group to 2, but there is one member that has:

  • notification_level set to 3 (watching)
  • Email me when I am sent a personal message: Always
  • and notification was received by this user

This user should receive an email, correct?

8

That one certainly sounds like they should have been sent an email. And there’s definitely no corresponding email log in either Sent or Skipped when you filter by their email/username?

1 Like
9

That was my understanding too.

Positive (no entries for the original PM in sent or skipped logs, mail was not delivered via mailgun).

And just to be absolutely sure, I tried again just now with the same user

  • as member of a custom group
  • and as a moderator

and as expected, the custom group email was logged as sent right away, and when I was sure the issue was confirmed, the email for the moderators group was also logged (and delivered via mailgun), but with a few minutes delay.

I have no Idea if this is an intermittent error or not, but I’m sure it’s not working reliably right now, and I would be willing to investigate further if you can provide additional guidance on where to look.