Issues with sending initial verification email on DigitalOcean

Support
1

This is less of an issue and more of a summary of what I just spent the last 2 hours trying to debug - hopefully it’ll save you some time!

I followed the instructions to a T for installing Discourse on DO. Booted it up and tried to set up my admin account. Fail. The verification email never went through. I went through alllllll of the troubleshooting documentation and eventually contacted DO support to see if I was being blocked somehow. Nothing.

If your emails aren’t going thru on DO (via Mandrill specifically, not sure if this is true for others):

If you set up your app.yml using an IP as your host instead of a domain, that’s the root of your issue. The notification email is coming from noreply@IPaddress which DigitalOcean or Mandrill or someone in between views as no bueno.

  • Set up a second admin account thru the CLI
  • Log into Discourse and go to the admin panel.
  • Change your notification email to a non-IP-based email account (preferably the one you have connected with Mandrill)
  • Save that
  • Log out of your second account and regenerate the verification email for that first account.
  • Success

Hope that helps!

3 Likes
2

Others have discovered this as well. We should block bootstrap if an IP address is set up as the mailing address, or at least put a comment to that effect in app.yml and the cloud install doc.

1 Like
3

For now I updated the email troubleshooting guide to explicitly cover this scenario. Thanks for the feedback, sorry for the frustration.