[Fixed] Discourse not sending activation email on sign-up or forgotten passwords

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Not requesting support. I’m posting to share what happened in case someone in similar situation is looking for a solution.

For some time now we noticed that our 1-year-old Discourse instance was not sending confirmation email for users signing up.

I tried sending test emails; they worked without a hitch. I checked our settings; nothing seemed out of place.I tried searching here; I couldn’t find any solution. I disabled our plugins and rebuilt the app; didn’t work.

But just as I was about to ask for support, I rechecked our settings one last time and found the cause.

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We thought setting this to “non-staff” would disable email digests to non-staff users.

Sure enough, it says “any kind of emails” but a warning would probably help, like “Warning: Setting this to “yes” or “non-staff” would prevent user signups on your Discourse instance.” or something to that effect.

Also, another confusing thing is that when a user signs up, a message would pop out that an email has been sent when in fact it wasn’t. So at first we actually thought it was a problem with our email provider.

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Anyway, now that the cause have been found, I hope this post would help someone else if their settings have been misconfigured.

Thanks for creating and improving Discourse!

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There is a global banner, but I think it would be good if the registration page would refuse to work rather than silently fail.

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To be fair it does say right there in your screenshot that this setting disables any kind of email.

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It reminds me of when I constantly got lost in Paris’s subway despite all information being written and available.

There might be areas for improvement for people who are very new to this :slight_smile:

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