Reply via Email — emails not getting to the staged user

[sheldrake (Philip Sheldrake)]

Hi. I have followed the advice here, thank you:

Set up Reply via Email Support

So you’d like to set up reply via email support for your Discourse forum. Reply via email is pre-configured and enabled by default on all discourse.org hosted sites. The guide below only applies to those self-hosting. Good news! Unlike outgoing email, which is completely unsuitable for typical consumer mail services like GMail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, etc, incoming reply via-email tends to be extremely low volume. Unless you have a truly massive forum with a zillion people replying to no…

Pop3 authenticated. I tested it by emailing our support email address — [instance]@gmail.com — from a completely different email account @other.com. Sure enough the email landed in the private category

I replied to @other.com (i.e. the staged user) in Discourse, and the reply is shown in Discourse but no email ever arrived back at the @other.com email inbox. Checked spam and nothing there.

Reply by email address: [instancename]+%{reply_key}@gmail.com

Interestingly, 40 mins later, an automated SUMMARY email from the Discourse instance landed in the @other.com inbox.

May I ask if anyone has any ideas? Thanks in advance.

[maiki]

If you are sending mail through your gmail.com account, I believe there are various issues that can crop up. But also, you can check the email logs on your site to see what it says, and then see if there are messages in the gmail account concerning bounced messages.

I use Mailgun and webhooks to show bounces in Discourse, and it just works and is really cheap and you ought to something similar.

@sheldrake

Interestingly, 40 mins later, an automated SUMMARY email from the Discourse instance landed in the @other.com inbox.

Is it possible you use a separate outgoing server than GMail? If so, that service will have logs for outgoing messages.

[sheldrake (Philip Sheldrake)]

Thanks @maiki. I’m using SendGrid. Works a treat. It was unclear to me following “Set up Reply via Email Support” how the emailed response to the staged user actually gets there. There is nothing in the SendGrid logs relating to a success or a fail. And nothing in the corresponding gmail account’s sent folder.

[maiki]

What does it say in the logs at /admin/email? Check /admin/email/sent specifically.

[sheldrake (Philip Sheldrake)]

Thanks. Still learning my way around Discourse.

Nothing whatsoever related to reply by email in the context here to be found in /admin/email/sent.

No idea what to check next. All ideas most welcome.

[maiki]

@sheldrake

Nothing whatsoever related to reply by email in the context here to be found in /admin/email/sent.

No idea what to check next. All ideas most welcome.

Test it again, and pay attention (now that you know where everything is); you can send more tests and figure out at which point it is failing.

If the staged users message comes in, reply to it (and wait for the edit window to expire so the message is sent), and then starting checking logs starting at Discourse, then Sendgrid, then whatever else.

[sheldrake (Philip Sheldrake)]

Thanks @maiki. Tested again. Sent in an email. As an admin, I hit “Reply” in the corresponding Discourse category and sent the reply on its way. But to where exactly I have no idea. There is no trace of anything happening that I can find anywhere other than the record of the reply in the Discourse category itself. Nothing in the Discourse email logs. Nothing in SendGrid logs. And definitely nothing arriving back in the originating mailbox.

[sheldrake (Philip Sheldrake)]

Last night I thought to try messaging a registered user. I went to /u, clicked the user, clicked message, and off went the message and back came the reply no problem at all.

So I’m thinking the failure of “Reply via email” must be gmail related.