Email "only when away" broken?

Product Support

AI-generated summary

ganncamp reported that their Discourse email notifications stopped arriving after being away for 9.5 days, despite having the setting “only when away” enabled. Upon investigation, they found emails were still being sent to others in their domain, but not to them — the last email to their account was on June 26. ganncamp later determined the issue was caused by prior email delivery failures (hard bounces) that pushed their account over Discourse’s bounce score threshold, triggering a block on further email delivery. They resolved the issue by resetting the bounce scores for affected users, as described in this guide, and expect this to restore email delivery.

1

I noticed on June 27 and June 28 that I didn’t have any reply emails in my inbox when I came in those mornings. I thought there was something wrong on our side (other senders were being blocked at our mail server) but was about to head out for a week of vacation & so didn’t worry too much about it.

I came back from being “away” for a full 9 days (okay, 9.5; I slipped out early Friday) to find… 0 Discourse emails in my email inbox.

Checking my site’s email logs,

  • emails are being sent to other users
  • emails are being sent to other users in my company/domain
  • the last time an email was sent to my email account was 26 June

I just checked my preferences & found that email was set to “only when away”.

So… it looks like something about that setting is broken

2

Following up on this, my company had email problems before this started, resulting in hard bounces of Discourse emails.

That pushed my account (and some others) over the bounce score threshold, so Discourse stopped bothering to try sending me emails.

I have Reset the Bounce Scores of the relevant users, and expect that to be the fix.