# Test emails work fine but nothing else
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/test-emails-work-fine-but-nothing-else/28214
**Category:** Self-hosting
**Tags:** email
**Created:** [May 1, 2015, 8:08pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/test-emails-work-fine-but-nothing-else/28214 "2015-05-01T20:08:13Z")
**Posts on this page:** 7
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@norbauer](https://meta.discourse.org/u/norbauer)
#### Post date: [May 1, 2015, 8:08pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/test-emails-work-fine-but-nothing-else/28214/1 "2015-05-01T20:08:13Z")
Hi all! Discourse is awesome, but I’m having trouble getting emails working.
I have installed to Azure using a Bitnami VM. I’m on Discourse v1.2.3, and I’m using Mandrill for mail delivery.
I went through all the email set up sets and sending test emails works perfectly. However, invites appear never to be delivered. I have checked in my Mandrill dashboard, and Mandrill never gets the request.
I have checked all the usual suspects such as spam filters, etc., but no luck.
I’m not familiar with Discourses’s internals. I could start digging into the Ruby and debugging, but I figured asking here would be a good start. Is it maybe the case that there is some kind of worker that comes through and periodically sends a queue of emails but that the test emails are sent immediately by the Rails app?
What is different about the test emails vs normal emails that could be causing the discrepancy? Any ideas for places to start debugging this issue?
Thanks in advance! 😄
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [May 2, 2015, 2:35am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/test-emails-work-fine-but-nothing-else/28214/2 "2015-05-02T02:35:26Z")
Check the email troubleshooting howto here. Did you verify that mandrill sees the emails through its logs, etc? does the email appear in admin, email, logs? Etc.
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### Author:  [@norbauer](https://meta.discourse.org/u/norbauer)
#### Post date: [May 2, 2015, 3:28am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/test-emails-work-fine-but-nothing-else/28214/3 "2015-05-02T03:28:42Z")
OK, I just figured this out, but to answer your question first, Jeff, Mandrill appeared to be getting no notification whatsoever that the app wanted to send a message unless the sent email it came from the email test utility.
Oddly, setting the DB hostname (from the IP to the proper name) in the application conf and restarting sidekiq is what was required. All appears to be working properly now. 🙂
You guys might consider having your email test form use the same facility to send mail as other parts of the app, since it’s a bit confusing when the test works but actual emails from the app fail. Just sayin’. 😉
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [May 2, 2015, 4:17am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/test-emails-work-fine-but-nothing-else/28214/4 "2015-05-02T04:17:14Z")
Part of your problem is Bitnami, this is an unsupported install.
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### Author:  [@norbauer](https://meta.discourse.org/u/norbauer)
#### Post date: [May 2, 2015, 4:46am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/test-emails-work-fine-but-nothing-else/28214/5 "2015-05-02T04:46:06Z")
Fair enough. Is there a better approach you would recommend for deploying Discourse to Azure? Would Docker in a Linux VM be considered a better approach?
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [May 2, 2015, 4:53am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/test-emails-work-fine-but-nothing-else/28214/6 "2015-05-02T04:53:08Z")
The Docker based install, wherever and however you can get it to run, is the only supported install. Unless the target Linux kernel is very old, it should be Docker compatible.
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### Author:  [@norbauer](https://meta.discourse.org/u/norbauer)
#### Post date: [May 2, 2015, 4:56am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/test-emails-work-fine-but-nothing-else/28214/7 "2015-05-02T04:56:09Z")
Cool, thanks. I’ll give that a try. I didn’t feel great about using the Bitnami interface anyway. It obscures what’s going on in the background in a way that makes me uneasy.