Watched categories and tags email notifications no longer working

Support
1

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.

2

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?

3

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

Screenshot 2020-06-09 at 19.55.43
Screenshot 2020-06-09 at 19.55.43672×156 9.73 KB

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)

4

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.

5

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.

6

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.

7

Do you mean these Sam?

Screenshot 2020-06-11 at 23.57.24
Screenshot 2020-06-11 at 23.57.241182×1364 91.1 KB

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.)

8

I would recommend starting by having a look at:

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

9

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: