Watched categories and tags email notifications no longer working

I have a few categories set to ‘watching’ and I used to get emailed whenever a new topic (or post in the watched category) would be made - but this is no longer working.

I’m not sure when it stopped working but a member who is watching a few tags has reported they are not receiving emails either.

I have also tried changing my email settings to ‘Send me an email when someone quotes me, replies to my post, mentions my @username, or invites me to a topic’ to always, but this hasn’t made a difference.

Is this still working on anyone else’s forum? I just upgraded and it’s still behaving this way. All other emails are being received as normal.

Are you getting a notification on the site for the new post? If so, what type of notification is it? Do you see anything relating to the post in the skipped email logs?

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We are getting notifications on the forum (for both watched tags and categories):

Screenshot 2020-06-09 at 19.55.43

But no emails. There’s nothing mentioned in /logs either.

Here on Meta, I did get an email for the latest announcement - but my watched status is different (set to only watch first post, rather than watch everything).

EDIT:

In email logs, under skipped there’s a Can't find a post with id 1953 but maybe that is because after checking I did not receive the email I deleted the Topic (so don’t think this is connected)

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For that case it seems that the post was deleted before Discourse sent the email. There is a delay before emails are sent to give the poster a chance to edit the post. That delay is set by the email time window mins site setting.

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Yes, but that would only explain why this latest test may not have sent out an email (and not the emails that should have been sent previously). I posted another test in the same category and left the Topic up longer than 10 minutes (Edit: left it for 23 minutes)… but still no email.

While waiting for that, I set a different category to ‘Watch first post’ then posted a new topic and did receive an email - so it seems this is not working for when you select the first option to watch everything.

Something sounds a bit fishy here.

Using a sock puppet account.

  1. Create a topic in watched category
  2. Look at email logs 15 minutes later

It could be skipping cause you are online for example. This is configurable in your profile settings.

Do you mean these Sam?

If that all looks ok, any ideas on where to begin to troubleshoot this? It’s odd that watching first post works but this doesn’t.

(I tested watching a category here on Meta and that seems to have worked as I got several emails, currently testing watching a tag.)

I would recommend starting by having a look at:

YOURSITE/admin/email/sent
and
YOURSITE/admin/email/skipped

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Thanks Sam… I think I know what may have been the issue. We have a category that is put on everyone’s auto-mute list and so I think that’s what may have been the issue. I’ve since removed it, and done some tests and it seems to be working now :smiley:

Thanks again for your help :slight_smile:

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