Removing staged users - how to?

[Ivan_Rapekas]

Hi, I set up email processing for incoming emails from anonymous users.

I decided to check this using an invite function. The email was sent from notification email to mailbox connected to category. A new topic was created successfully, the staged user was created too.

Then I open the mailbox and forward the invite mail to myself (i.e. again to the category). With the beta option for forwarded emails enabled the system returned a message that topic could not be created because no body detected. Seems like a bug, but nevermind. As a result, the second topic Email issue – No Content was created from the same staged user.

The question is how to remove this staged user …

I open admin panel, go to users, staged. Then first click to remove all user’s posts, next remove the user (just remove without blocking IP). After a few minutes, the user with its messages is returned. How to remove it and messages? What’s wrong? There are no any errors or warnings in log.

[Ivan_Rapekas]

Removed it. That user (with the same email and nickname) was created 3 times. I assume that it is incorrect behavior. Admin cannot detect how many users correspond to email until checking user id in the database. Looks like a bug but I am not sure.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Are you sure the email was the same? Staged users exist only as emails so I am not sure how duplicates could be possible. Can you provide the specific user info here?

[Ivan_Rapekas]

Yes, I am. After I deleted the user 3 times with its messages, Topics table has the following info:

You may see that ids 330, 332 and 334 should be a single topic, they even have the same time of creation. I think each time I tried to delete the user a new user was creating, therefore topics have update timestamp.

The same for ids 331, 333 and 335.

My settings:

• anonymous posting min trust level = TL4
• pop3 polling enabled
• pop3 polling username = support@tmch.icu
• pop3 polling delete from server = off
• log mail processing failures = on
• email in = on
• email in min trust = TL0
• block auto generated emails = off
• enable forwarded emails = on

The issue is reproducable, steps:

1. Assign email to category, let it be support@tmch.icu, my category is accessible only to groups.
2. Go to invitations in your profile https://tmch.icu/my/invited (I am an admin)
3. Send an invitation for support@tmch.icu
4. After 5 minutes check received email at https://tmch.icu/admin/email/received
5. Check if staged user has appeared at https://tmch.icu/admin/users/list/staged
6. Check if topic created
7. Open mail client for support@tmch.icu and forward the invitation just received to support@tmch.icu. Do not change the email, just forward as is.
8. After 5 minutes check received email at https://tmch.icu/admin/email/received - probably it will not be processed because of empty body, ignore it.
9. Go to https://tmch.icu/admin/users/list/staged and delete the staged user. The correspond topic will be deleted automatically.
10. Wait 5 minutes and refresh the following pages:
    https://tmch.icu/admin/users/list/staged
https://tmch.icu/admin/email/received
your category
11. You should see the deleted user and topic has appeared again.
12. Repeat steps 9-11, you should see the same, last time.

[Ivan_Rapekas]

This user is still alive… It is resurrected every time I delete him. How can I investigate this deeply?

Update: to resolve this I removed incoming email address at the category for 10 min. After that an email dropped to noreply@tmch.icu (this is a notification email, from which invites send) informed that address support@tmch.icu is unreachable. This has stopped.